comfortable.’
He loosened his collar and looked around the room. Not at her belly. Not at the baby blanket. Not at the woman who had once believed his face was a safe place.
‘That happens when you work yourself up over things,’ he said. ‘I told you to stop reading reviews and scaring yourself.’
June touched the edge of the blue blanket. ‘How was the client dinner?’
‘Necessary.’ He stepped out of his shoes and left them in the middle of the floor. ‘You would not understand half of it.’
No, June thought. Apparently she understood far too much.
‘We need to be disciplined right now,’ he added, already walking toward the bathroom. ‘No more talk about strollers or cribs or whatever else you saw online.’
Disciplined.
June almost laughed.
Disciplined was comparing diaper prices until the numbers blurred. Disciplined was watering soup because groceries had gotten expensive. Disciplined was pretending she liked the maternity coat from the donation rack because Marcus said new clothes were wasteful.
Disciplined was not sending thousands of dollars to another pregnant woman for a blush-pink nursery.
‘You’re right,’ June said. ‘We should be careful.’
Marcus paused.
He knew how to respond to tears. He knew how to twist anger until it became her fault. He knew how to sigh, withdraw, punish, return, and make her grateful for the return.
He did not know what to do with her quiet agreement.
‘Good,’ he said finally, and disappeared into the bathroom.
June waited until the shower started before she let her face change.
The next morning, the second warning arrived on Marcus’s phone.
He was in the shower again, humming softly, when the screen lit up on the dresser. June was crossing the bedroom with clean towels pressed against her chest. She stopped because her name appeared in the preview.
She did not touch the phone.
The message unfolded by itself across the bright screen.
Clara: Did she see the payment? Your mother said June is too emotional to notice anything important.
June’s fingers tightened around the towels.
Another message appeared before she could move.
Clara: Don’t forget the lawyer today. Once she signs over the house account, we can stop pretending.
The towels fell silently onto the rug.
House account.
June felt the room narrow around those words.
The apartment was hers. Not theirs. Hers. The brownstone unit had belonged to Maeve, then to June by deed, separate from the marriage, protected exactly the way Maeve had insisted.
After the wedding, Marcus had joked about it at first.
‘My wife, the landlord,’ he would say, raising a glass at dinner parties.
Later the jokes changed.
‘It is strange, isn’t it?’ he had said one night while washing a wineglass. ‘A married couple, but only one name on the property. Kind of sends the wrong message.’
June had laughed then because she thought he was teasing.
His mother, Evelyn, had never teased.
Evelyn Wren was a woman who wore pearls to casual lunches and delivered insults in the voice of a nurse checking a temperature. During June’s pregnancy, she had begun appearing with casseroles, prenatal vitamins, and helpful articles printed on expensive paper.
She said pregnancy made women vulnerable to anxiety.
She said legal decisions were stressful.
She said Marcus had a better head for paperwork.
