At first, Maya didn’t understand the silence.
She stood in the doorway of her apartment with her weekend bag slung over one shoulder, her makeup smudged beneath her eyes, and the smell of campfire smoke from the lake still clinging to her clothes. For a few seconds, she simply listened.
No crying came from the bedroom.
No soft little whimpers.
No restless sounds from the crib.
The apartment was exactly as she had left it three days earlier. The same blanket was folded over the back of
the chair. The same baby bottle sat beside the crib. The same pale morning light filtered through the curtains and stretched across the floor.
But something was wrong.
The
Just three days earlier, she had walked out of that same apartment, telling herself that she deserved to breathe again.
She was twenty-one years old, beautiful, restless, and used to being noticed. Before the baby, her life had been filled with loud music, late-night drives, cheap perfume, fleeting freindships, and men who loved her only
until morning. She liked being the girl everyone called when there was a party. She liked the feeling of walking into a room and knowing people were watching her.
Motherhood did not fit into that life.
Her son had been born from a relationship that had never really been a relationship. The man had smiled at her for one summer, touched her
picture. When Maya told him she was pregnant, he looked at her as if she had brought him bad news
that belonged to someone else.
“This isn’t my life,” he had said.
And then he made sure it wasn’t.
He blocked her number, deleted their photos, and left Maya alone with a baby she had never planned for and a loneliness she had no idea how to survive.
The people around her all kept saying the same thing.
“You’ll feel different once the baby is born.”
“You’ll become a mother the moment you see him.”
“Everything will make sense when you hold him
in your arms.”
But when the nurse placed the tiny baby against her chest, Maya felt something far colder than joy.
She felt trapped.
He was
the room smiled as though a miracle had taken place. Maya looked down at him and waited for the magical feeling she had been promised.
