“Don’t do anything stupid,” he’d told her, low and warm.

“You know you’ll always matter to me.” I had put the envelope back in my bag and gone home and decided I would tell him when the timing was better.

The timing was never better.

And so he learned he was going to be a father and learned he had lost the chance in the same sentence, from a stranger, in a hospital, and I lay in the bed and watched it land on him and felt — nothing.

A clean, total nothing, where three years of hope used to be.