At seventeen weeks, something shifted in me that was not physical.
The physical changes had been shifting for some time, accumulating in ways that were becoming less possible to conceal or to explain away within the professional context of the household. Dr. Vance had been clear in his last visit about the trajectory, and the body had been proceeding along that trajectory without particular regard for the timing of anything else happening around it. But what shifted at seventeen weeks was something else entirely. The reality of it stopped being a crisis I was managing from a careful distance and became instead a presence I was simply living alongside, the way you live alongside something that has always been there once you stop trying to walk around it.
Charles had known for five weeks. He had been, in the manner of a man who processes significant information privately and then acts on it without requiring discussion or acknowledgment, quietly extraordinary about all of it.
