At twenty-two, I slipped back into the country without telling anyone, just to have a little fun.
At a party with friends, I fell for Edwin Vance the moment I saw him, and I started chasing him.
At first he thought I was too young.
So I chased him shamelessly, offering him my whole heart with both hands held out.
Flowers. Jewelry. I proposed to him myself.
People laughed at me, said a girl shouldn't throw away her dignity like that.
I didn't care. When you love someone, isn't that exactly how brave you're supposed to be?
In the end, we were together.
A year of dating, and then we married.
Four years of marriage, and every single day, I was the one giving, always so careful.
He'd give a little back now and then, and I'd feel like the whole sky had cleared.
Then I got pregnant, and I noticed he seemed happy, that he was even giving me more than usual.
But something inside me grew uneasy.
I kept clinging to him, asking whether he loved me.
He never said the word love, but he answered gently enough, *I'll come home early.*
Until this time, when the private phone he never let even me touch was picked up by someone else and used to send me message after message.
That was when I finally understood.
From the very beginning to the very end, he had never once held me in his heart.
But it was fine. It was over.
And I didn't have any love left to give.
Seeing that I stayed quiet, he must have assumed I'd softened. He came over to me and bent down to take me in his arms.
"All right, enough. Don't read into it. I had the housekeeper make you some soup. Drink a little and get some rest. Tomorrow's the weekend, I'll go out with you and we'll—"
"I got rid of the baby."
I said it so softly.
But his whole body went rigid.
His arms still hung in the air, frozen in the shape of the embrace he hadn't finished.
The living room was quiet enough to hear the clock ticking on the wall.
Once. Twice. Three times.
Then he straightened up and looked down at me, as if he hadn't taken it in.
"What did you say?"
I lifted my head, met his eyes, and said it one word at a time:
"I said, the baby is gone."
"After you finished sending me those messages, I went to the hospital and had the procedure."
The color drained from Edwin's face, bit by bit.
Five years of knowing him, and I'd almost never seen him lose his composure.
In front of everyone he was always smooth, always in control, his emotions steady as a precision instrument.
But in that moment, the instrument jammed.
It felt strangely new to me, and I just kept watching him.
"You ended it without discussing it with me?"
My lips were still curved. "Yes."
"Marie." He said my name, and his voice was shaking. "That was my child too."
I gave a careless shrug.
"I know that."
"You know?" His voice shot up, his eyes going bloodshot in an instant. "You knew, and you still went to the hospital alone and ended it, without saying a single word to me!"
"Marie! As far as you're concerned, do I even count as your husband?"
He had never raised his voice at me like that.
The few times we'd quarreled before, the most he ever did was go cold and silent and wait for me to back down first.
In that moment, I started to laugh. "Edwin Vance, so you can get angry after all? So your eyes can go red after all? So there's actually something that can make even you lose control? And here I thought all you'd ever do was freeze me out."
Edwin went blank for a beat, then his hand shot out and clamped around my chin, fire in his eyes.
"Marie! What the hell are you trying to pull? I already told you I didn't send those texts. Why won't you believe me?"
"And that wasn't only your child. It was mine too. What gave you the right to go and get rid of him on your own?"
"If you're capable enough to abort my child by yourself, then you can give me another one!"
