That night, after my mother went to bed, I carried the watch and my ring into the spare room that would be the nursery. The walls were still only half painted. Sample cards in soft greens and warm whites were taped near the window. My grandfather’s old mechanical pencil sat on the sill beside the sonogram print from sixteen weeks—the one where the baby looked more like weather than a person.
I put the watch in the drawer without ceremony.
The ring took longer.
Not because I wanted to keep wearing it. Because my hand remembered the shape even after my mind stopped asking it to.
The baby rolled under my palm, strong enough now to change the whole line of my stomach. Outside, tires hissed over the wet street. A neighbor’s porch light clicked on. Somewhere two houses down, somebody shut a car door and a dog barked once, then settled.
On the desk behind me sat the cream-colored notice from Edwin, the copy of page eleven, and the interim board papers waiting for my signature once I was ready. I stood there in stocking feet, coat gone, one hand on the edge of the crib box still taped shut against the wall, and listened to the quiet I had built finally sound like mine.
Just before dawn, the rain stopped.
A pale stripe of light came through the nursery window and touched the sonogram first, then the trust papers, then the plain gold ring lying by itself on the white-painted sill. Outside, the street was empty except for water drying in silver lines along the curb. Gregory’s watch stayed hidden in the drawer. The baby shifted once under my hand. In the glass, my reflection stood there without him, and when the sky brightened, it did not look unfinished.
