I had known, from the moment Lily said the word Mommy, that this conversation was coming.

I had simply decided, some years earlier, how I was going to have it.

I had rehearsed it, in a sense, not the words but the posture, across a hundred idle moments over seven years — folding laundry, driving home from a late shift, watching Lily sleep.

Not because I was plotting, but because a single mother in a small city knows that the past is never permanently gone; it is only away, and cities are small, and someday, at a wedding or a grocery store or a school function, the man would resurface, and I did not want to meet that moment as the woman he remembered.

So I had thought about who I meant to be when it came.