Her arms looked frail and hollow.

And yet her stomach was round, and firm, and protruding, straining against her loose blouses.

I had given birth only months earlier.

I knew that silhouette.

I knew it intimately.

My mother looked, to my eyes, unmistakably pregnant.

The thought, when it first surfaced, seemed absurd, and I pushed it away.

But it came back, and each time it came back it curdled a little further, from absurdity into suspicion.