I counted the pregnancies I hadn’t wanted and had agreed to anyway.

I counted the times I’d smiled while a relative said we’d keep trying until we “finally got a boy,” and how I’d let that sentence land on my daughters, again and again, until some part of them had surely learned to hear it — the idea that they were a series of not-quite-enoughs, a road the family was traveling to get to someone better.

I had told myself for nine years that my endless yielding was love.

It wasn’t.

It was disappearance.

And a birthmark the size of my thumbnail had finally, brutally, made me look at the woman I had been slowly erasing to keep a fragile peace.