Chapter 2

The ward went quiet all at once.

Not the quiet of no one having anything to say.

It was the quiet of everyone swallowing their words back down, lips pressed into a thin line, not knowing what to say.

Sonia kept her head down. The baby in her arms was already asleep.

A long moment passed before she lifted her face.

Her eyes were red, her voice so hoarse it was almost inaudible. "Fine... I'll pay."

She reached for the phone on the nightstand, fingers still trembling, and had to swipe twice before the screen unlocked.

"Let me call my dad."

She scrolled the contacts to "Dad," her thumb hovering over the call button, hesitating for several seconds.

The woman in the next bed suddenly leaned over and dropped her voice at me.

"Young man, take a word of advice from me and stop this. It's just a bit of money. If word of it really reaches your father-in-law, there'll be no coming back from it. A wife willing to bear your child these days is a rare thing. Look how tight she's holding that baby. Can't you just—"

"Dad."

The call connected.

The woman's words stuck in her throat. She sighed and sank back into her chair.

Sonia's voice cracked with tears she was fighting to hold down, but the harder she held them the more it shook. "Dad... I've had the baby, we're both fine... it's just, the surgery and the hospital fees, I'm a little short on my end, could you maybe..."

Her father's voice came through loud, and in the silent ward every word carried clear.

"Short on money? Where's Eugene? He's not at the hospital with you? How does that boy always vanish the second it actually matters?"

Sonia's tears finally broke loose, running down her cheeks and dropping onto the baby's blanket.

She bit her lower lip and made no sound, but her shoulders were shaking.

"Sonia? Sweetheart, say something. Did something happen?" Her father's voice turned urgent.

She sniffled, and when she spoke again her voice came out in pieces. "Dad, Eugene's here... but he says now that I'm pregnant we split everything fifty-fifty, that this bill is mine to pay, and I'm not working right now, I really can't come up with it..."

Three seconds of silence on the other end.

Then her father's voice went low.

Not a shout. That kind of low that holds the fire down, and somehow it clenched at you worse than a shout would. "Sonia, put Eugene on the phone."

Sonia held the phone out to me without daring to meet my eyes.

I took it, and the second it touched my ear her father's voice slammed into me. "Eugene, in these two years Sonia's been married to you, has she done you wrong? Did she cheat? Make a fool of you? Did the Henson family ever treat you badly, that you'd hurt our daughter like this the very moment she needed you most?"

I gripped the phone and said nothing.

Back when I'd just graduated, I couldn't find work. I sent out a hundred resumes and every one sank without a trace.

I had a little over two thousand in my pocket, couldn't even make rent, and sat in that rented room staring at my phone.

Sonia came home from work, asked nothing, set down her bag, sat beside me, and pulled up her paycheck card to show me. Balance: two thousand eight.

"Enough to get us through a month," she said. "You'll land something next month for sure."

Later we went to New York. She found a job first, admin work at a small company, forty-five hundred a month.

We rented a partitioned room outside the beltway, shared kitchen and bathroom, no heat in winter. She never complained once.

Every payday she went to the supermarket downstairs and bought two cups of discount yogurt, stuck straws in them, and tapped hers against mine.

"To surviving another month." Her eyes curved when she smiled.

The first time I got paid, eight thousand.

I bought a bunch of daisies at the subway entrance, thirty dollars. She froze for a few seconds, lowered her head to smell them, and looked up with her eyes gone red, saying why waste the money on that.

Then she put the flowers in a water bottle anyway, changed the water every day, and kept them two whole weeks.

Before we married, I'd racked up a hundred thousand in debt from a failed venture, and collection calls blew up my whole contact list.

She transferred me every cent she'd saved from work, thirty-six thousand, all of it. Scholarship money, internship stipends, the coins she'd pinched from her food budget, all of it, without a blink.

"Pay off the most urgent ones first. We'll figure out the rest together."

She said it while chopping vegetables, as flat as if she were covering a utility bill for me.

When her father gave her away, he told me: our Sonia wants you for who you are.

Treat her well, and our family wants nothing else.

Later, when we renovated the marital home, her parents paid for more than half.

On moving day her father hauled bag after bag up six flights, his back soaked through, and pressed two thousand into my hand before he left, telling us to build a good life together.

Those two years, she wore that same set of pajamas until the edges frayed, and never replaced them.

I forgot her birthday. She bought herself a little cake and waited up for me past midnight, then fell asleep against the couch.

Did she treat me well?

I didn't dare ask myself.

Her father was still shouting on the other end. I couldn't get out a single word.

When he heard I wouldn't answer, his voice shook with rage. "Eugene, do you even remember what you had going for you back then? A country boy, making a few thousand a month, and it took you years to barely clear ten. Her mother and I looked down on you from the start, and not because you were poor. Because you had no drive. But Sonia was dead set on marrying you, wouldn't listen to anyone, fought with her family over it more times than you know. Do you have any idea?"

I knew.

I knew all of it.

His voice suddenly climbed, nearly a roar. "She quit her job to stay home and carry your child and give birth to it, and you expect her to go fifty-fifty with what? That set of pajamas on her back she's worn two years and won't replace, do you know that? And look at you now, made something of yourself. Made enough that you won't even cover a seven-thousand-dollar surgery for your own wife?!"

I glanced down at Sonia.

She held the baby, her face turned aside, her ears and neck flushed deep red.

Tear after tear fell onto the pillow without a single sound. The baby was still asleep, its little face scrunched, the corner of its mouth twitching as if it were nursing in a dream.

No one in the ward said a word.

Even that neighbor who liked to smooth things over kept stealing looks at me and not daring to, and the moment her eyes met mine she dropped her head.

Her father's voice had gone hoarse, as if from shouting, or as if something had lodged in his throat.

"Eugene, I'll ask you just one thing. Do you have any conscience at all?"