They sat in a neat row on the bathroom sink, white plastic and pink lines and digital screens spelling out a truth I had almost stopped believing could belong to me.
Pregnant.
My knees gave out so suddenly I had to sit on the closed toilet lid. I laughed first, then cried, then laughed again because the crying wouldn’t stop. I remember pressing my hand over my mouth as if the news were too bright to touch with bare skin.
I was thirty-one years old. I lived with my husband in a cedar-sided house outside Columbus, Ohio, where the kitchen windows looked out over a narrow patch of backyard and a maple tree that turned fire-red every fall. I worked as a second-grade teacher. Evan sold medical software and made more money than I did by talking fast in conference rooms and over steak dinners.
We had been married for six years.
