No plan.
Just habit disguised as hope.
I walked toward a quiet seating area near the far wall and sat in a low velvet chair angled toward the elevators. My knees felt strange, disconnected from the rest of me. I placed the dry cleaning bag across my lap, folded my hands over it, and stared at the brass elevator doors until the numbers above them blurred.
Five minutes earlier, I had been Daniel Carter’s wife.
Now I was something else.
I just did not know the name for it yet.
We had been married for six years. No children, not by tragedy exactly, but by postponement—the quiet kind of postponement that hardens into fact while people keep telling themselves there is still time. First we wanted to pay off the car. Then Daniel wanted to wait until his promotion stabilized. Then I started working longer hours at the nonprofit and felt too tired to imagine pregnancy. Then my mother got sick, then his father needed surgery, then we simply stopped talking about it except in the vague way people say someday when they are no longer sure they mean it.
