I was eight months pregnant and whispering to my baby when Boston police called to say my husband had been found unconscious in a luxury hotel bathroom with another woman, and I drove to Massachusetts General still praying it was a mistake
The night the police called, I was sitting cross-legged on my bed, one hand spread over the curve of my belly, whispering secrets to the son I had not yet met.
At thirty-three weeks pregnant, I had developed a habit of talking to him when the house fell quiet. I told him about ordinary things—how the rain had looked on the windows that morning, how the basil on the kitchen sill refused to die, how his mother still cried in supermarket parking lots when she saw fathers lifting babies into car seats. I told him about Boston in late September, when the air sharpened after sunset and the harbor smelled like metal and salt.
I told him about the room that would soon be his, painted a soft gray because I had been too afraid of anything too bright, too hopeful.
Mostly I told him what I had never dared say out loud after my first two losses.
Stay.
I was rubbing slow circles over the place where his heel nudged against my skin when my phone lit up on the nightstand. The vibration startled me so badly I almost knocked over the glass of water beside it. For one ridiculous second I thought it might be Gabriel calling to say he was finally on his way home, that the client dinner he’d been talking about all week had ended early, that he would bring me decaf tea and one of those almond croissants from the bakery near the office because he knew I’d been craving them.
Then I saw the number.
Boston Police Department.
A cold ribbon of dread slipped through me.
I answered with a dry throat.
“Hello?”
A man’s voice came through, practiced and steady. “Mrs. Peterson?”
“Yes.”
“This is Officer Nolan with Boston Police.
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