She had put the truth in an envelope — the ultrasound, the clinic slips, the real photograph before it was cropped — and she had trusted, against all the evidence of that terrible night, that if she just asked him quietly enough, her husband would open it and see.

It was the last act of faith in him that she would ever make, and he did not even get the chance to fail it honestly, because his mother swept the envelope off the table before his hands could reach it.

But he could have reached for it.

That was the thing he would never be able to unfeel.

In the seconds before Junia grabbed it, he could have picked up that envelope, and he did not, because he did not want to — because opening it might have complicated the clean story in which he was the wronged man, and even standing there watching his pregnant wife walk into the cold, some cowardly part of him preferred the simplicity of blaming her to the difficulty of believing her.

His mother hid the envelope.