The Man I Loved Disappeared the Exact Night I Told Him We Were Having a Baby — Two Weeks Later He Knelt in My Grandfather’s Gravel Driveway and Told Me He Hadn’t Run From Fatherhood; He’d Run to Burn Down His Entire Inheritance So His Family Could Never Come for Our Child

The other was so deep a brown it looked, in certain light, almost black.

Heterochromia, the doctors called it, gently, reassuring me it was harmless.

It was the exact same rare, mismatched gaze that had stopped me in my tracks the first time Ezra smiled at me across a coffee shop, two years before — the eyes I had fallen for before I even knew his name.

My daughter had her absent father’s face.

I told myself, holding her, that I did not care, that she was mine and Bruno’s and that would be enough, that a girl did not need a man who ran.

I believed it, mostly.