I tried not to respond to his mood. Over the previous year and a half, I had learned that silence was often the safest reply, not because silence worked exactly, but because it bought time before things escalated. I sat with my hands folded across my belly and watched the streets scroll past the window and thought about nothing in particular, which was itself a kind of practice I had developed without naming it.
About fifteen minutes into the drive, a sharp pain twisted low in my stomach. It was not the usual pressure I had grown accustomed to, not the stretching or the dull persistent weight that had become background noise over the past several weeks. This was sudden, deep, and wrong in a way my body communicated very clearly. I pressed my palm flat against my belly and shifted in the seat.
“Eric,” I said carefully, “I need you to pull over.”
He didn’t look at me. “You’re fine.”
A second cramp came before I could answer, stronger than the first, spreading upward in a way that made my breath catch. “No. Something doesn’t feel right. Please, just stop for a minute.”
He exhaled through his nose in that sharp, dismissive way that I had stopped noticing years ago and had only recently begun to hear again. “I’m already running late, Claire.”
“I understand that. I’m asking you to stop the car.”
He swerved abruptly onto a side street without slowing down first, braked hard enough that I had to brace against the dashboard, and then turned toward me with a face so cold it barely seemed like the face of someone I had chosen and lived with and shared a bed with for three years. There was no concern in it. There was annoyance, and something harder underneath.
