The clinic was clean and quiet. The kind of place where they didn't ask questions and they didn't keep records that anyone could find. I lay on the table and stared at the ceiling, and the fluorescent light above me buzzed with a faint, insistent hum that sounded like a question I couldn't answer.
The procedure was over before I knew it. The baby was no longer inside me in just a few minutes. That was the part no one tells you. How fast it is. How the thing you've been carrying, the thing you've been talking to in whispers when no one else is home, the thing you've been apologizing to in the bathroom with your hand on your stomach, just... stops. In minutes. And then you're standing up, and the nurse is handing you paperwork, and the world expects you to walk.
So I walked.
I was already in line to settle the bills, standing under the harsh clinic lighting with my discharge papers in my hand, when I saw them.
Two figures at the end of the corridor. Walking toward me. Close together. His hand on the small of her back.
My husband with his ex.