Chapter 1 — Keep Standing

“You can stand,” my husband, Julian, said casually, his breath turning white in the freezing December air.

“You’re pregnant.

Think of it as exercise.”

He said it as though humiliating his six-months-pregnant wife on a train platform were the most ordinary thing in the world, which, by that point in our marriage, it more or less had become.

In his gloved hand he held, casually, two first-class sleeper tickets for our cross-country journey home.

Beside him stood my sister-in-law, Chloe, wrapped in a designer trench coat that had cost more than the first car I ever owned.

“Oh, Nora, I feel absolutely terrible,” she said, in the sweet, poisoned voice I had come to know so well, staring at me with a small, smug smile.

“But my motion sickness gets unbearable on long trips.

I really do need the sleeper.” Julian’s story was that the holiday rush had left him with only two sleeper tickets.

His brilliant solution to this scarcity was to put his pregnant wife in an unheated coach car for fifty hours, standing, while he and his brother’s wife relaxed together in a warm, private cabin.

Fifty hours.

Six months pregnant.

Standing, in the cold.

And I want you to notice the small, telling detail of who got the second ticket: not me, the pregnant one, the one who most needed to sit and stay warm, but Chloe, my brother-in-law’s wife, whose only stated ailment was a motion sickness that a sleeper car would apparently cure.

I noticed it.

I noticed everything, by then.

I just did not, yet, let them see that I did.