The sun rose earlier and set later. Her belly got bigger and bigger. Her back ached, her feet were sore, she was exhausted all the time. She’d hoped the changes to her body would make Roy leave her alone, but it seemed to have the opposite effect. He put his hands on her whenever he wanted, which was all the time. When she resisted, he got mean, so she didn’t resist. Valentine’s day was especially hard.

Every hour, she worried that he would learn the truth about the baby. He was too smart not to figure it out that she was too damn pregnant. If she stayed long enough to give birth, surely he would realize that the child couldn’t possibly be his. She told herself that he would let them go, her and the baby, but she knew that was a fairy tale she made up to make herself feel better.

The baby would fit in the freezer, too.

As the months passed, her indifference toward the passenger in her belly faded away. She found herself loving her unborn child with an intensity that often scared her. She stood at the window and cradled the growing belly in her arms as if it were a newborn. She thought about her mom all the time, and the things they had done when Helene was a little girl, making dandelion crowns in the yard and drawing pictures at the kitchen table, long before her dad had disappeared and everything changed. She wondered what kind of mother she would be. She wondered if she would ever get out of there.

Near the end of March, there was a thaw and the snow began to melt in earnest. She could stand on the porch and hear it trickling downhill to the river. She put on her disintegrating sneakers and wrapped herself in the quilt and walked through the wet meadow with frozen feet, just to be outside, realizing for the first time how the cold winter had hardened her.

She found the sagging fence around the old garden, now a riot of wild plants still dormant, waiting for spring. As she high-stepped through a tangle of weeds, her shoe landed on something that rocked underfoot.

Roy was in the basement with the door closed. When he was home, she always knew where he was. She squatted down, not easy with her huge belly and sore back, and worked her hand through the thick mat of vines until she found it. An upturned shovel.

Not a whole one, because the handle was rotted away, but the metal part. The curved blade of the spade and the short tube at the top where the wood handle had been inserted. Rusty, yes, but solid enough.

She left it there, invisible, under the plants.

It was the first thing she knew that Roy didn’t.

The first crack in his control.

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