remember taking the pregnancy test. Four days later in the bathroom of Old Grove, still with brown stains on her cuffs. Positive. Four weeks.

A father whose name was on nothing.

She had held the silk in her lap on that bus and had not been able to throw it away. It had not felt like garbage. It had felt like something she had been trusted to carry.

She had been twenty-four. She had been alone. And she had understood, without anyone telling her, that a stranger dying in an