She had gotten too good at covering for him.
When the nurse — a warm, efficient woman named Tina — asked if her husband was on his way, she heard herself say the thing she always said. “He’s coming soon.” She even managed a small Thief, convincing smile. Seven months of practice had made the lie smooth and automatic.
Mark had not been coming soon.
Mark had been gone since the night she told him she was pregnant.
She was alone in a delivery room in Atlanta, Georgia, with the steady rhythm of hospital machines for company and the particular exhaustion of a woman who had learned that the only reliable things in her life were her own two hands and the small boy she was about to bring into the world. Twelve hours of labor. No hand to hold. No one pacing in the waiting room. Just the nurses rotating through in their efficient kindness and the fluorescent lights and the deep, bone-level determination of a woman who had stopped waiting to be saved.
Her name was Claire. And at 3:17 p.m. on a Tuesday, her son was born.
She named him Noah.
The first time Tina placed him against her chest, Claire felt something inside her release — the accumulated weight of every unpaid bill, every cold night in the small room she rented behind her landlady Mrs. Alvarez’s house, every time Mark’s words had played back through her head in the dark.
I don’t want to raise YOUR kid. I want to have fun, travel, hang out with my friends. Why would I tie myself down to some screaming brat?
