Holding on to that hope, that dream of love, and a better life than the one she had working as an aesthetician on the Island, painting rich ladies’ toenails, waxing their upper lips and bikini lines, Sharon had skipped the appointment that Kevin had made. When he’d texted, from the burner phone he’d bought, the one he used only with her, she’d lied. Everything’s fine, she’d written, and added, See you next summer! with an exclamation point, and the heart-eye emoji. Meanwhile, the baby was growing inside of her: a secret, an insurance policy. She’d have the baby; she’d present him (she knew it was a boy) to Kevin like a prize. Then he’d see how happy they could be together.

Things had not gone according to plan. The baby arrived in the middle of April, two weeks early, and with jaundice, a condition that kept her in the hospital for ten days, and cost $2,000 in deductibles. She’d finally gone back to her apartment, where she’d learned that single motherhood was a lot harder than she’d expected. The delivery had torn her wide open. She’d gotten eleven stitches, and she’d had to borrow her mother’s hemorrhoid pillow to sit on while she held the baby (a girl, after all) and tried to feed her. Ashlynne was a tiny, bald, unlovely, rashy thing. She barely slept and screamed every moment she was awake. She was allergic to Sharon’s breast milk and, seemingly, allergic to Sharon’s touch. Instead of soothing her, being cuddled by her mother seemed to only make her madder. Ashlynne would shriek for hours, then collapse into a brief, thin sleep, then jolt herself awake and start screaming again. She was not, Sharon finally admitted, the kind of baby who could win a man’s heart. Rather, she was the kind of baby who would send a man running. Running back to his dried-up, leathery, menopausal hag of a wife, back to his soft-handed, spoiled-rotten children, still barely employed, still getting allowances at twenty-five and twenty-six.

“It’ll get better,” Sharon’s sisters told her. Amanda had had her first baby at twenty-one. Cathy, the family’s success story, had finished two years of college and gotten married before having her first at twenty-two, but then Cathy’s husband had bailed when her kids were toddlers, leaving her no better off than the rest of them. “This is the hard part,” they said, and Cathy had patted her back, and Mandy had given her a glass of wine.