At Easter dinner, my mother-in-law had me
The kitchen smelled the way it always did when I cooked for too many people: roasting meat, boiling starch, and underneath everything else, the faint metallic edge of my own anxiety.
It was Easter Sunday. I was seven months pregnant. I had been on my feet since six in the morning, and the clock on the wall above the stove now read two forty-seven in the afternoon. My ankles had long since passed the stage of discomfort and arrived somewhere closer to a low, persistent burn that ran from my feet all the way up into my lower back. The maternity dress I had chosen that morning for its breathability was already plastered against my skin. I had tied an apron over it because Eleanor had commented, at the previous Christmas gathering, that pregnant women who cooked without aprons were inviting disaster.
I am Clara. I am thirty-two years old. And this is my house.
That last fact mattered more than it might seem. I had purchased this house outright, in cash, four years before I ever met David Vance. I had earned the money through a decade of disciplined, unglamorous work as a forensic auditor. The kitchen I was sweating in, the dining room where twenty members of David’s family were currently drinking my wine and laughing at things that had nothing to do with me, the oven I had bent my aching knees to haul a twenty-pound ham out of, all of it was mine before David was. I had never forgotten that. I had simply, over three years of marriage, allowed myself to act as though it no longer applied.
