My father reminded me of everything I didn’t have.

I had no money. Two hundred and forty dollars in a savings account from babysitting. I had no car. I had no job. I had no place to live except his house. I hadn’t even graduated from high school yet.

“You have nothing, Anne,” he said. “You have nowhere to go.”

He was right about almost all of it.

But he was wrong about one thing.

I had Daniel.

Daniel Abbott was nineteen. He’d graduated the year before me. He worked at his uncle’s auto body shop on the edge of town and took night classes at the community college. He wanted to be a nurse. Everybody laughed at him for it. A boy wanting to be a nurse. He didn’t care.

We’d been together for a year and a half. We met at the public library, in the biology section. He was trying to find a book on anatomy for his class, and I was trying to find the same book for mine. There was only one copy. We ended up studying together at a table by the window. We studied together every Tuesday and Thursday after that for three months before he finally asked me to the movies.

He was gentle and funny and serious all at once. He had dark hair that fell in his eyes and grease under his fingernails that never quite came out. He read poetry. He hated it when people littered.

When I told Daniel I was pregnant, we were sitting in his old blue pickup truck in the parking lot behind the library.

I cried for ten minutes before I could even say it.

When I finally said it, he didn’t say anything at all for a long moment.

Then he reached over and wrapped both arms around me and held me against his chest. I could hear his heart going fast.

“Okay,” he said into my hair. “Okay, Annie. Okay.”

“I’m so scared, Danny.”

“Me too,” he said. “But we’re going to be okay.”

He pulled back and looked at me. His eyes were wet.

“We’ll rent a little apartment,” he said. “Over the laundromat on Fourth Street, maybe. They’ve got one for two-fifty a month. I’ll pick up extra hours at the shop. I’ll switch my classes to weekends. We’ll make it work.”

“You really want to?”

“Annie,” he said, “I’ve wanted to marry you since the library. I was just waiting until I had enough money for a ring.”

I laughed through my tears.

“You don’t have enough money for a ring.”

“Not yet,” he said. “But I will.”

We talked about it every night after that, for two weeks, sitting in his truck.

We talked about the apartment over the laundromat. About what color to paint the nursery. Daniel wanted yellow. I wanted green. We decided on yellow with green trim. He said he’d build a crib himself. His uncle had tools.

We talked about names. If it was a girl, we’d name her Rose, after my grandmother. If it was a boy, I wanted Fabian.

“Fabian?” Daniel said. “That’s a fancy name.”

“My grandmother had a dog named Fabian,” I said. “When I was little. The best dog in the whole world. He used to sleep at the foot of my bed whenever I stayed over.”

Daniel laughed.

“You want to name our son after a dog?”

“A really good dog,” I said.

He kissed my forehead.

“Fabian it is,” he said.

Four days after I told my parents, I went to Daniel’s house on Birch Lane after school.

I’d been calling him for two days. His phone just rang and rang. I thought maybe his parents had found out and taken his phone away. I thought maybe he was sick.

I walked the six blocks to his house.

There was a FOR SALE sign in the front yard.

I stood on the sidewalk in front of that sign for a long time.

The curtains were gone from the windows. I could see straight into the living room. It was empty. No couch. No TV. No family pictures on the wall. Just bare carpet with dents where the furniture used to be.

Daniel’s blue truck wasn’t in the driveway.

I walked up to the front door and knocked anyway. Nobody answered. I looked through the little window beside the door. The hallway was empty all the way back to the kitchen.