After fourteen, I stop expecting it this week.
After twenty-two, the shape of the fear changes.
I'm not afraid for myself. That's the strange thing. Or maybe it isn't strange.
Maybe it's just that I've been afraid for myself for so long that the muscle is exhausted and can't contract any more.
I've been afraid since I was seven years old, watching my mother shrink every time a key turned in a lock. Fear is the background hum of my existence and it doesn't spike the way it used to.
What spikes is the thought of Dom.
If Dom were dead, I'd be dead. That's the math. I'm leverage. Leverage requires a target. If the target is gone, the leverage has no value and the people holding it have no reason to keep feeding it prenatal vitamins and gas station sandwiches.
So, he's alive. He has to be alive because I'm alive and that's the only equation that works.
But alive doesn't mean safe and alive doesn't mean looking. Alive could mean injured. Alive could mean making a deal that doesn't include me.
That last thought arrives on day twenty-five, or what I think is day twenty-five, and it sits in my chest and won't move.
He wouldn't. I know he wouldn't. He is not going to trade me away. I'm his. He told me that enough times. The one thing I am certain of is that he will tear down the world to find me.
The thought should make me angry. It does make me angry. But underneath the anger, I find something else.
Nobody has ever wanted me before.
The thought arrives without drama. Just a fact, sitting there, the way facts do.
My mother wanted to protect me but she couldn't. My father didn't want me at all. The foster homes wanted the check. The motel clerks wanted cash and the dealers wanted chips and the casinos wanted the money in my pocket and nobody, in twenty-six years, has ever looked at me and wantedme.
Dom does. I know he is wrong for me in so many ways. He is possessive, controlling — all of it.
But the want is real. I smelled it on him. I tasted it. I felt it in the way his hands found the scars on my back and moved around them, careful, without being asked.
I have a lot of time to think down here.
I lie on the mattress with my hand on my stomach, which is no longer flat. The curve is small but definite. I can feel the taut roundness of it under my palm and sometimes, when I'm very still and the building above me is quiet, I think I can feel something else. A flutter. A shift. Something alive in there, turning.
"It's going to be fine," I say to the ceiling. To the baby. To myself. "He's coming."
The weeks keep passing.
I know they're weeks now because the bump grows. Pregnancy is its own clock and this one is ticking visibly.
My jeans stopped buttoning somewhere around what I estimate is week ten. I've been wearing them open with the zip down and my T-shirt pulled over and when the next food delivery comes, I ask for larger clothes and the right-hand man glances at my stomach and two days later there's a bag with two pairs of sweatpants and three T-shirts, all too big, all new.
I'm being kept. Someone is investing in me and the investment is long-term.
The isolation works on you in stages. First the fear. Then the boredom. Then something worse: a formless gray fog thatrolls in and fills the room and makes everything feel like it's happening at the bottom of a lake.
The pacing helps. Talking to the baby helps, although I'm aware that talking to an unborn child in a concrete cell is not the portrait of a man who's coping well.
I tell it about its father, because I might as well.
"He's big," I say. "He's stubborn and he's possessive and he smells like whiskey and cedar and he thinks he owns everything, including you and me." I press my palm flat against the curve. "He's probably tearing the city apart right now. That's what he does. He decides what belongs to him and then he refuses to let it go."
My voice echoes off the concrete and dies.
"I used to think that was the worst thing a person could be," I say. "I'm not sure anymore."
