The next-door neighbor, an older woman named Mrs. Pruitt, came out onto her porch.

“Are you looking for the Abbotts, honey?” she called.

“Yes, ma’am. Daniel. Do you know where he is?”

Mrs. Pruitt looked at me with pity.

“They moved, sweetheart,” she said. “Three days ago. Very sudden. A moving truck came Saturday morning, and they were gone by Sunday night. Mr. Abbott got transferred, I think. Out of state somewhere.” She frowned. “Daniel didn’t say goodbye to you?”

I couldn’t answer her.

I walked home. I don’t remember the walk.

When I got home, I called Daniel’s number one more time.

The number you have dialed has been disconnected or is no longer in service.

I was devastated.

I thought Daniel had left me. Left us. Our baby.

I thought all that talk in the truck about the apartment over the laundromat and the yellow nursery and the crib he’d build was just talk. That when it got real, when his parents found out, he’d run away. Like boys do.

I didn’t get out of bed for three days.

My mother brought me soup and left it on my nightstand. I didn’t eat it.

My father didn’t say a word to me.

When I finally got out of bed, I tried to find another way.

I looked for work. I applied at the grocery store, the drugstore, the diner on Main Street. Nobody wanted to hire a pregnant eighteen-year-old who still had six months of high school left.

I looked at apartments. The one over the laundromat on Fourth Street was still available. Two hundred and fifty dollars a month, plus a deposit. I had two hundred and forty dollars.

I sat on the curb outside that laundromat and did the math over and over on a napkin. It didn’t work. It never worked.

Then, unexpectedly, my parents softened.

It happened slowly. In November.

My mother started coming with me to my doctor’s appointments. She sat in the waiting room with her purse in her lap and held my hand when they did the ultrasound. When we heard the heartbeat for the first time, a fast little whoosh-whoosh-whoosh like galloping horses, she started crying.

My father asked me one night at dinner, without looking up from his plate, whether we’d need to buy a crib.

I stared at him across the table.

“Yes, Dad,” I said. “We’ll need a crib.”

He nodded and went back to eating.

Then, one evening in early December, they sat me down at the kitchen table.

My father was at the head of the table. My mother was next to him, holding his hand. I’d never seen them hold hands before.

“We’ve been thinking,” my mother said. “Your father and I. We’ve been praying about it.”

My heart was pounding.

“You can stay here,” my mother said. “With the baby. We’ll help you. We’ll help you raise him.”

I burst into tears.

I put my face in my hands right there at the kitchen table and cried with relief. I’d been so scared for so long. Ever since the FOR SALE sign. I’d been lying awake at night thinking I’d have to sleep in a shelter. That I’d have to give my baby away.

“Thank you,” I kept saying. “Thank you, thank you.”

My mother came around the table and hugged me.

My father patted my shoulder twice.

After that, everything felt possible again.

I found a part-time job at Hoffman’s Bakery on Main Street, working weekend mornings. Mrs. Hoffman didn’t care that I was pregnant. She said her own daughter had been pregnant at seventeen and turned out just fine. She let me sit on a stool behind the counter when my feet swelled up.

I bought tiny baby clothes at the thrift store. Little onesies with ducks on them. A blue knit hat. A yellow blanket with satin edges.

I taught myself to crochet from a library book. I made a pair of baby booties out of soft white yarn. I made the first one six times before I got it right. The second one only took me twice.

They weren’t perfect. One was a little bigger than the other. But I’d made them myself, with my own hands, for my baby.

I tucked them into the top drawer of the little white dresser my father carried up from the basement and set up in my room.

I decided on the name Fabian. For my grandmother’s dog. For Daniel, who’d laughed about it in his truck.

Even though Daniel was gone, I wanted to keep that one thing from him. That one conversation.

My son was born on May third, at 4:47 in the morning, at St. Mary’s Hospital.

Seven pounds, two ounces. Twenty inches long. A full head of dark hair, just like his father’s.

The nurse laid him on my chest still wet and crying, and I put my hand on his back, and he stopped crying.

He opened his eyes. Dark eyes. Deep and serious. He looked up at me like he already knew who I was.

“Hi, Fabian,” I whispered. “Hi, baby. I’m your mama.”

He wrapped his whole tiny hand around my finger.

I promised him right then, with his hand around my finger, that I’d love him forever. No matter what happened. No matter where either of us ended up.