Edward would come home from his shift at the prison looking exhausted and asking her not to ask him about his day, so they’d eat in silence. The same silence she’d had to listen to all day.

“What the hell’s that smell?” Edward said one night when Vivian’d burned the soup again.

Except that he wasn’t talking about the soup. He was in the bedroom.

“Well,” Vivian shouted in irritation through the smoky kitchen, “that’s our baby, roughing up my insides, is what it is.”

She’d been using the sick bowl for the past few weeks. Goddamned outhouse was too far away. Today was the first day she’d forgotten to empty it.

So, that’d come out a whole lot more awkward than she’d planned, her special announcement. She wanted to do something a little fancier, maybe with candles and dinner that wasn’t burned, with a bouquet of late autumn wildflowers in the crystal vase they’d received as a wedding gift from Edward’s cousin Evelyn. The kitchen table wouldn’t have held all of that at the same time anyway, but still. This wasn’t the way she’d wanted to do it.

Goddammit.

She’d lain next to Edward in bed that night, wide awake while he snored soundly. The warm glow of Edward’s excitement about the baby had worn off as soon as he’d fallen asleep and Vivian was already back to stewing about his complaint. Her moods had been getting sourer and sourer with every week. It was easier to be ornery than to be sad and sorry for herself. She couldn’t let this hopeless helplessness swallow her whole, and who was he, anyway, to be complaining about smells? The sick bowl, the burned dinners. He comes home smelling like a goddamned latrine on fire and I don’t say a thing. Boys, men. They never did learn to keep after themselves. Snips and snails and puppy-dog tails. She hoped her baby would be a girl.

Vivian got her wish, and little Charlotte Catharine Dalton (a lovely, significant, and important name) was born on February twenty-second, nine months and seventeen days after Vivian and Edward’s wedding day. The pregnancy had been nine months of sick and grumbling and aches, and then the labor, whoo-boy, she wouldn’t be going through that again. Vivian told Edward that would be it for her.

“You’d better like this one,” she’d breathed, while propped up in the hospital bed, wan, sweating, and drained of energy. “She’s going to be the only one.” It would be too bad for Edward, she’d thought. He’d probably wanted a boy. He hadn’t said as much, but she knew people.

Charlotte’s birth made Vivian twice as anxious as she’d been when they first moved to the little yellow house the year before. She’d spent so much time worrying about the prison, the criminal inmates, and the proximity of their house to all of it, she hadn’t had time or brain space to consider any other types of threats. Little Charlotte was just seven months old at the time of the attack.