When she closes her eyes she can still smell her, powdery and sweet, skin pink from the bath. I’m doing this for her, she told her husband on the pay phone outside of Baltimore. He didn’t understand and she couldn’t bring herself to say it. All those times she thought about how much easier it would have been for everyone if she’d held the baby down under the surface of the water in the bathtub. She could have done it with one hand. She thinks about the girl in the shop again, with her practiced adult voice, the too-smooth assuredness of her gestures, her hands. What had happened to her, that she was working in that dingy little storefront? And those posters she kept seeing all over town, about the missing teenage girl? Were they girls whose mothers had ruined them, or ones who never had a chance because their mothers were like her—too afraid of screwing up to even stick around? It was a feeble gesture, leaving that $10 bill, but for a moment it had made her feel a little lighter. At least she could care for someone’s girl.

A man takes a seat at the other end of the bar. She watches him order a drink and thumb through the cash in his wallet, waits for him to feel her stare. He is probably twenty years older than she is, wears a wedding ring—which, of course, doesn’t mean anything—and the top three buttons of his shirt are undone to expose the glint of a gold chain tangled into a pelt of graying chest hair. He looks up at her and she tilts her head at him, but he breaks away when a woman brushes behind him, takes the seat next to his. She can tell by the tension in the woman’s arm that she’s wrapping a hand around his thigh. She had never felt compelled to touch her husband like that in public, to lay claim. Sometimes, when they were at parties together, she would watch a woman flirt with him—her husband laughing a little too loudly or leaning in a little too close—and would feel like it confirmed something. How easily she would be erased, cut out of the equation. It was useful information, she thought. She stored it up, to make the leaving easier.