I thought about every time I’d caught him on his phone during an ultrasound, angling the screen away.
“The appointments,” I said slowly. “That’s what you were doing on your phone.”
“Job applications.”
Then I thought about the nursery. The crib. The little dresses in the drawers Claire had cried over.
“The nursery,” I said. “The clothes. Everything in that room.”
“Credit cards.”
“How many?”
“Three.”
He looked like he wanted to disappear into the floor. “Claire thinks we paid for it out of savings.”
“There are no savings.”
“Not anymore.”
I sat down. My legs had genuinely stopped being able to hold me up.
“So when Dr. Alvarez started talking about surgery costs—”
He didn’t let me finish. “I didn’t see my daughter.”
His voice cracked in half.
“I saw one more bill I couldn’t pay, stacked on top of every other bill Claire doesn’t even know exists.”
