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I press my lips together and try for the thing I actually planned, the thing that was going to make this easy.

"I know we said same time next year." I close my eyes. "I'm about eleven months early."

He doesn't laugh. "You all right?"

I quit trying to make this funny. "I'm pregnant."

The line stays open, and nothing comes through it. I've been carrying this for a week. I can give him fifteen seconds.

"I thought you said you took care of that."

"I did, Christmas morning. Or at least I thought I did. Evidently it didn't work."

The dishwasher clicks over into its next stage behind my head. He clears his throat.

"It's yours," I tell him. "There isn't anybody else it could be."

He still doesn't say anything.

"You don't owe me anything. I'm keeping it. I'm telling you because you should know, not because I need something." I look up at the dark window over the sink. "If you don't want to be involved, I'm not going to chase you down over it."

The dishwasher grinds on behind me. "Hang on," he says.

A chair scrapes on his end, wood on a hard floor. Then a man's voice says something low and even, too far from the phone for me to catch the words. I hold still on my kitchen floor.

A door bangs, and I can't tell whether it opened or shut. Then wind hits the phone hard enough to drown out everything else, and it doesn't let up.

I don't know where he is, and I don't ask. Then his voice comes back through the wind. "I don't want you doing this alone."

"I won't be alone. I've got people." I shift the phone against my ear. "I just wanted you to know. I can keep you posted if you want me to."

"I'm sending money. Every month."

"Carson, you don't have to⁠—"

"That's not a negotiation, Mackie."

My mouth closes. I've told grown men in boardrooms to sit down, and they took longer to do it than I just did.

"Fine." I clear my throat. "I'll send you my Venmo."

“Your vin— what?"

"Venmo."

"I don't have that."

I laugh, a small one, and it's the first time I've laughed in a week.

"Okay. Okay, cowboy. I'll give you my address. You can mail me a check like it's nineteen ninety."

I give it to him slowly, street and town and zip, in case he's writing it on his knee out there in the wind. He doesn't read it back.

"I don't know anything about this sort of thing. When do you see a doctor? Do you know when you're due? What happens next?"

"I made the first appointment. February fifth. They'll do an ultrasound and give me a due date then, I think. My best guess is sometime in September."

"What time on the fifth?"