In March, I found out I was pregnant.

We’d been trying for two years. We’d almost stopped hoping.

I took the test in the upstairs bathroom at five in the morning, and I didn’t even wait for the full three minutes. I just sat on the edge of the tub and watched the second line show up, slowly, like a photograph developing.

I walked into the bedroom holding it. David was still asleep, flat on his back, one arm over his eyes.

I sat down on the bed next to him and held the test in front of his face.

He opened one eye. He looked at it.

He opened the other eye.

He sat straight up so fast he hit his head on the reading lamp.

The next day, he went out and bought a baby blanket. Soft yellow cotton, with little gray elephants on it. He brought it home in a paper bag and laid it out on our bed and just looked at it.

“It’s too early to buy stuff,” I told him. “It’s bad luck.”

“It’s a blanket, Maya,” he said. “Blankets can’t be bad luck.”

He folded it very carefully and put it in the top drawer of the dresser.

Three weeks later, he left on his last deployment.

In April, two officers in dress uniforms knocked on my front door.

I knew before I opened it. Everyone in our world knows. Two officers in dress uniforms on your front porch on a weekday morning only means one thing.

They said David had been killed during an operation overseas. They said they were very sorry. They said that, because of the nature of the operation, his remains hadn’t been recovered yet. They said they would do everything they could.

I thanked them. I closed the door. I sat down on the floor of the front hallway with my back against the wall.

I was nine weeks pregnant.

That night, I called my parents.

They lived three hours away, in the house I grew up in. My father, Gary, was a retired insurance adjuster. My mother, Diane, had been a church secretary for thirty years. They were the kind of people who had the same thing for dinner every Tuesday and went to bed at ten o’clock and never, ever talked about anything uncomfortable at the table.

My mother answered. I told her.

She was quiet for a second. Then she said, “Oh, Maya. Oh, honey. We’re coming. We’ll be there tomorrow.”

They came the next afternoon with two suitcases and a casserole.

And they never left.

At first, I was grateful.

I really was. I couldn’t do anything. I couldn’t eat. I couldn’t sleep. I’d wake up at three in the morning and reach for David’s side of the bed, and it would be cold, and I’d remember all over again.

My mother made meals. My father mowed the lawn. They answered the phone when people called. They sat with me.

After about two weeks, I said, “You can stay as long as you want. Really. I’d like you here.”

My father nodded. My mother hugged me.

That was the invitation. That was all I ever said.

It was open-ended. I didn’t think it needed to be anything else. They were my parents.

But slowly, over seven months, things changed.

It happened so gradually that I didn’t really notice until it was too late.

First, they moved into the bigger guest room instead of the small one. Then my mother rearranged the kitchen cabinets. “It makes more sense this way, honey.” Then my father moved David’s recliner out of the living room and into the basement, because he said his back needed the couch.

Then my father’s poker friends started coming over on Thursday nights. Three or four men I’d never met, in my dining room, eating chips and laughing loudly until eleven o’clock. My father never asked me. He just told me.

“The fellas are coming over tonight. You don’t mind.”

It wasn’t a question.