The Choice to Stay

I checked my phone for the seventeenth time. Nothing. The motel room smelled like bleach and stale coffee. Lily was asleep on the bed, Glitterhoof tucked under her arm, the narwhal wedged against the pillow like a tiny blue guardian.

This was not the contract marriage I signed up for. This was not the secret baby arrangement either. This was day eleven without Sebastian. Day eleven of running with a four-year-old who kept asking when Daddy would come back.