At 2:07 in the morning, I reached across our bed and discovered my husband's side was cold.

By midday Saturday, the loneliness in the house had taken on a physical texture. It felt like fine, gray dust coating the furniture, the kitchen countertops, the unopened nursery dresser drawers filled with newborn onesies that had been washed in fragrance-free detergent.

My phone rang at 11:30 AM. It was Eleanor, Jake’s mother.

"Maya, darling," her voice was bright, artificial, and drenched in that patronizing cheerfulness she reserved for subordinates and service workers. "I’m just at the Whole Foods on Colorado Boulevard. Do you need any of those organic elderberry teas or sprouted grain bread? Jake mentioned you were resting this weekend."

I held the phone slightly away from my ear, staring at the kitchen sink. "I don't need elderberry tea, Eleanor. I need my husband."

There was a heavy, disapproving pause on the other end of the line. "Maya, men process profound transformations differently than women do. A woman becomes a mother the second she conceives. A man doesn't understand until he holds the child. Richard was the exact same way when I was carrying Jake. He took a long weekend in Santa Fe. It gave him perspective. You have to give them a long leash, dear, or they strangle themselves on it."

"Richard died alone in a trailer in Wyoming, Eleanor," I said, my voice completely devoid of emotion.

The silence that followed was icy.

"I’ll leave some fresh soup on your front porch at four," she said, her voice dropping twenty degrees. "Try to elevate your feet. You sounded hysterical when Jake called me."

She hung up.

I threw the phone onto the couch. My pelvis felt like it was being pried apart by a crowbar. I had spent the morning trying to distract myself: I had organized Theo’s cloth diapers by color, checked the expiration dates on the infant formula samples Dr. Feldman had given us, and sanitized three pacifiers in boiling water. But every time I passed the hallway mirror, the image of my own reflection horrified me. My skin was pale, my eyes hollow, my body a massive, vulnerable vessel left stranded on dry land.

At 2:00 PM, I opened Instagram on my phone.

I told myself I wouldn't. I swore I would delete the app until next week. But the toxic, self-destructive impulse won. I tapped the small magnifying glass and looked at Brad’s profile. Brad’s account was public. He was an "outdoor lifestyle micro-influencer" who couldn't take a sip of water without geotagging the mountain spring.

There it was. A reel posted forty minutes ago.

The caption read: *"Escaping the matrix. 72 hours of pure highway, zero responsibilities. Moab was epic, next stop: Sin City. #FreedomRun #BoysTrip #LastRide"*

The video was set to a pounding rock track. The first clip was Brad behind the wheel, sunglasses on, yelling over the wind. The camera swung around to the back seat.

There was Jake.

He was holding a cold aluminum can of craft IPA, sitting with his feet propped up on a cooler. The window was down, his dark hair whipped into a frenzy by the Utah desert wind. For a split second, he looked directly into the camera lens. He wasn't smiling. His face looked tight, his eyes slightly glazed from the beer, looking more like a runaway hostage than a man enjoying his youth. But then Brad screamed, "Miller! Tell 'em what freedom tastes like!"

Jake raised the beer can, forced a lopsided, performative grin, and yelled, "Tastes like twelve hundred miles, baby!"

My stomach plummeted straight into my bowels.

The man who had held my hair over the toilet during twelve weeks of crippling hyperemesis gravidarum. The man who had massaged my calves with lavender lotion when the third-trimester cramps woke me up screaming. The man who had whispered to my belly, *"I can’t wait to meet you, Theo, I’m going to teach you how to build a treehouse."*

He was in Utah, drinking an IPA at seventy-five miles per hour, performing bachelorhood for twenty-two hundred strangers on the internet.

I closed the app, dropped the phone, and went into the nursery.

I sat down in the gray glider chair Jake had spent three weeks researching because he wanted one with whisper-quiet ball bearings that wouldn't wake the baby. I pulled the stuffed fox off the shelf—the one he had bought the afternoon we found out we were having a boy—and pressed it against my chest.

A sudden, sharp cramp seized my lower abdomen.

This one was different. It wasn't the dull ache of sciatica or the broad, harmless tightening of Braxton Hicks. This felt like a thick rope twisting around my cervix, pulling tight, holding for a full sixty seconds, sending a nauseating pulse of heat radiating down into my inner thighs.

I gasped, gripping the wooden armrests of the glider.

*One, two, three, four… breathe through your nose, out through your mouth.*

The pain peaked, crested like a violent wave, and slowly subsided.

I reached for my phone, my hands trembling. I unlocked it and went to Jake’s contact. I hit the call button.

*Ring.*

*"Hi, you’ve reached Jake Miller. Leave a message, or shoot me a text if it’s urgent."*

*Beep.*

"Jake," I said, trying to keep the panic from cracking my voice into shards. "I’m having regular cramps. They hurt. They aren't Braxton Hicks. You need to turn the car around right now. Brad can drop you off at an airport in Salt Lake or Grand Junction. Please. Jake, please call me back."

I hit end.

Ten minutes passed. Then twenty. Then forty.

No call. No text.

At 3:45 PM, a single text notification popped up from his number:

*Jake: "Hey, service is spotty between Moab and Vegas. Just saw your voicemail. Maya, Feldman literally said two days ago you were fine. Take two Tylenol and lie down on your left side. You’re working yourself into an anxiety spiral because I’m gone. We’re almost in Nevada. I’ll call you from the hotel tonight."*

I stared at the screen until the letters blurred into glowing white streaks.

He thought I was faking it. He thought his wife was staging labor pains out of spite to ruin his road trip.

I didn't reply. I stood up from the rocking chair, walked into the bathroom, and pulled down my maternity leggings.

There, on the white cotton of my underwear, was a smear of thick, pink-tinged mucus.

The bloody show.