He didn’t say another word. He just left.
I sat there, exhausted, still hooked to monitors, holding a newborn whose parents had both just collapsed in front of her, one screaming and one gone.
The nurse crouched beside my bed. “Nora. Look at me. Breathe.”
I looked down at the baby instead.
She’d already stopped crying. Her tiny mouth opened and closed, slow, like she was testing the air.
I pulled her closer to my chest.
“You’re not going anywhere,” I told her. “Nobody is abandoning you. Do you hear me?”
I started calling her June that night, before anyone had officially named her anything. It felt wrong to keep calling this small, real person “the baby” while her father was somewhere in that hospital pretending she didn’t exist.
Claire stayed at the hospital that first night, sleeping in a chair pulled up beside my bed, unable to go home to a nursery she suddenly wasn’t sure she’d get to use. Daniel didn’t come back. He texted me once, at 2 a.m.: Is she okay? I didn’t answer him. I didn’t know how to answer a question like that from a man who’d walked out on the “she” in it.
