Marion
The city never truly slept, and neither did Marion.
At three in the morning, the apartment hummed with the quiet machinery of modern life—the soft whir of the AC, the distant elevator cables singing in their shafts, the occasional siren bleeding through triple-paned glass. Twenty-seven floors below, the boulevard stretched like a glowing artery, its traffic reduced to the occasional ghost of a taxi.
She pressed her palm against the swell of her belly and felt the answering flutter beneath her skin. Not yet, little one. Not yet.
The baby had been restless all evening, as if sensing her tension, as if already attuned to the fractures in their small family. Marion shifted on the couch, rearranging the pillows that had become her constant companions. Her back ached with the particular intensity of late pregnancy—thirty-four weeks, the doctor had confirmed on Tuesday. Thirty-four weeks of carrying this weight, this hope, this terror.
Jack should have been home hours ago. She checked her phone again. No messages. No missed calls. The screen glowed accusingly in the darkened living room, displaying the time with indifferent precision. 3:17 AM.
There are reasonable explanations, she told herself, the familiar litany rising unbidden. He'd mentioned late-night calls with old friends abroad—Singapore, New York, São Paulo.
Jack was always connecting someone to someone else, spotting possibilities where other people saw unrelated pieces. Lately it was smart-home systems and robotics coming out of Radiance. Before that, a distribution deal he had sworn could become something enormous.
Jack never really had one business. He had opportunities, and an almost compulsive instinct for chasing them. A call at midnight was therefore entirely plausible. Reasonable explanations.
She clung to them, but the reasonable explanations had grown thinner over the months, worn transparent by repetition. She could see through them now, to the darker shapes beneath. He wouldn't, she thought. Not now. Not when we're so close.
The apartment around her stood as evidence of how close they were. The nursery was finished—had been finished for weeks, because Marion had thrown herself into the project with the particular intensity of a woman who had always needed to build things with her own hands. She'd assembled the crib herself, following the instructions with meticulous attention, her pregnant belly making the work awkward but not impossible. The dresser had come from a secondhand shop, sanded and repainted in soft sage green. The rocking chair had been a gift from a colleague, its wooden frame polished until it gleamed.
She'd done it all herself, and not just because she wanted to. Jack's body still imposed limits neither of them liked to acknowledge. Some days the nerve pain left him unable to stand for long; and anyway, his allergies to dust mites made her handle this sort of thing.
So Marion had built most of the nursery herself. She'd measured and screwed and assembled, kneeling on the floor with her heavy belly and aching back until frustration brought tears to her eyes. But she'd finished it. She'd created a space for their baby, a small kingdom of soft light and gentle colors. It helped, somehow, to think of Liv and John as she worked. Her friends in Singapore—the ones she'd chosen as godparents before knowing Mia’s gender. She'd sent them photos of the finished nursery, had video-called them from the rocking chair with her hand on her belly, had listened to Liv's delighted squeals and John's quiet, steady reassurance. We're with you, they'd said. Even from here. We're with you.
She clung to that. To the knowledge that somewhere, thousands of kilometers away, there were people who loved her and loved this baby and would be there for them both, no matter what happened.
Because here, in Radiance, she had no one. She'd tried to build a network—had looked into prenatal yoga classes, had researched meetups for expats, had even exchanged numbers with a few women who seemed kind and welcoming. But the connections had remained shallow, superficial, never given room to grow. Because Jack required her presence. They'd agreed, before the pregnancy and again when the test turned positive, that his recovery had to remain a priority—essential to building a healthy family, to becoming the man and father he wanted to be. She'd promised to support that recovery. Somewhere along the way, without noticing exactly when, supporting it had begun to mean arranging her own life around it.
So she'd stayed close. She'd been available. She'd made herself into the anchor he needed, the steady presence he could rely on. She'd told herself it was temporary, that once he was stronger, once the worst was behind them, she'd have time to build her own life here. She'd told herself that soon she'd have friends, a community, a place where she belonged.
But that time had never come.
She checked her phone again. Still nothing. Still silence.
She thought about Mia—about the name she and Jack had chosen together, months ago, when everything had still seemed possible.
Mia, she whispered silently. Mia, Mia, Mia. A name that meant mine in so many languages. A name that meant beloved. A name that she'd already begun to whisper to the baby in the quiet hours, when Jack was asleep or away or simply absent in all the ways that mattered.
She pulled up his contact, her thumb hovering over the call button. The reasonable explanations were running out. The unreasonable ones were crowding in, demanding attention.
He wouldn't relapse. Not a few weeks before my term.
But she knew better than to trust that hope. She'd trusted it for the first two and a half months of her pregnancy, when everything had seemed so perfect, so impossibly good. Jack had been sober, present, the man she'd fallen in love with—attentive and loving and full of plans. And then something had shifted.
She still didn't know what had triggered it—if there had even been a trigger at all. Perhaps it was simply the weight of it, the enormity of what they'd committed to. Perhaps it was the fear, the knowledge that there was no going back now, that the child growing inside her would soon be a person who depended on them for everything. Perhaps it was just the inevitable gravity of his disease, pulling him back toward the darkness he'd fought so hard to escape.
Whatever had caused the first crack, Marion had learned one thing since: a relapse never ended when the drinking stopped. It left questions behind. Vigilance. Promises she wanted to believe and a part of herself she hated for checking them.
She had tried to understand. She had read about recovery, listened when Jack spoke about pain and cravings, and reminded herself that illness was not a moral failure. But lately she had begun to wonder where compassion ended and disappearance began—his, and then hers.
She was carrying Mia. Increasingly, she felt as though she were carrying everything else too.
This wasn't how she'd imagined her first pregnancy.
She'd imagined sharing it. She'd imagined late-night conversations about names and nursery colors and the future they'd build together. She'd imagined his hand on her belly, his voice in her ear, his presence in every moment, the particular joy of watching him become a father—of seeing his face transform with wonder, of knowing that they were building something together, something that would outlast them both. Instead, she was alone.
Sometimes she tried to guess what happened inside him when he disappeared. Fear? Pain? Shame? She never knew, and lately she trusted her own explanations less and less.
The not knowing made her chest ache with a pain that had nothing to do with the baby. Marion called his number.
It rang six times before going to voicemail. His recorded voice was warm and assured, the voice he used for business and strangers who somehow became useful contacts before a conversation was over. "You've reached Jack. Please leave a message."
She didn't leave a message. What was there to say?
The clock ticked forward. 3:42 AM. Mia shifted again, a rolling movement that made her gasp. She placed both hands on her belly, felt the hard curve of a foot pressing against her palm. I'm here, she told her daughter silently. I'm here, and I'm not going anywhere. It was a promise she was determined to keep.
