If I remembered an argument clearly, he said pregnancy was making me emotional.
If I tried to leave the room, he stood in the doorway and asked why I was behaving dramatically.
By the time his mother began repeating his explanations, even ordinary conversations felt like traps.
The recordings gave me one thing their version of me did not have.
A voice that stayed the same after the room changed.
By the next morning, my lips had split around the straw.
My neck burned where the wet dirt rubbed against my skin, and my left foot had gone numb hours earlier.
I had not eaten since they brought me outside.
A paper plate with half a sandwich sat on the porch railing until the wind pushed it onto the grass.
Mara watched it land a few feet from me.
She looked at the sandwich, then at my face, and laughed as though the distance between us were a joke.
My husband’s mother told her not to encourage me.
Neither of them picked up the plate.
Ants reached it before I could stop looking.
I told myself hunger was information, not an order.
Pain was information.
Fear was information.
None of it had to make my next decision for me.
My husband came down the steps carrying a plastic pitcher and stopped close enough for me to see dried soil packed into the seams of his work boots.
The sight of those boots frightened me because they made the whole thing look ordinary.
He had worn them to work.
He had walked through the house in them.
Now he stood over his pregnant wife as though this were another chore he had added to his day.
“Still stubborn?” he asked.
I watched the pitcher instead of his face.
His mother stood in the doorway with one hand resting against the frame.
Mara leaned forward in her lawn chair, interested again now that something was happening.
My husband poured slowly, careful to miss the straw while his mother watched.
The water struck my hair first, then ran over my forehead and into my eyes.
