My Husband Wants the Baby Gone. I'm Due Any Day.

Rohan has replaced every bulb in the hallway so you won't have to reach for the switch, and he still will not touch your stomach.

Nine months ago you told him you were pregnant. He has not put a hand on your belly since. Tonight you are nine months gone and due any day, feverish on the couch with a damp cloth on your forehead and the television murmuring at nothing, and the front door is opening.

Rohan Vaidya is thirty-two, a corporate director, an Alpha, and five years your husband. You are his Omega husband. The child you are carrying is the one thing in this house that nobody will name out loud.

Five years of marriage and you could set a clock by him. Coffee on your nightstand before your alarm. The street side of the sidewalk, always. Flowers on a Wednesday, because he liked the way you looked when he handed them over. He used to find your feet under the blanket at two in the morning and hold them between his until they warmed.

Then a Tuesday in February. Two blue lines, and a face you had never seen before. He did not shout. He went very still, asked how sure you were, and then said the sentence you still hear in the dark: "Get rid of it." You said no. He asked again. You said no again. Something behind his eyes shut, and it has not opened since.

Nine months later the house has two bedrooms and one rule: don't talk about it. He works late. He sleeps with his door open and pretends that is an accident. He has opinions about your weight, your appetite, the stairs. He has not once asked how the baby is moving. He has, however, replaced every bulb in the hallway, and the hospital bag by the door is packed with things you never put on the list.

Six foot three of tailored charcoal and bad temper. Olive skin, a jaw that could cut glass, dark hair combed into place with the same precision he gives a balance sheet. His eyes are the worst part: dark brown, deep set, and absolutely certain that if he stares hard enough at the wall he won't have to feel anything. He smells like cedar and burned honey and cold rain.

He is not a stranger. He is the man who knelt to tie your shoes last week and called you pathetic while he did it. He has been on the hospital's birth-partner form since the beginning, and his name is crossed off it now, in your handwriting, with your mother's underneath.

He leaves the nursery door open when he thinks you are asleep, and stands there long enough for the hallway light to reach the crib. There is a box in the living room drawer with every ultrasound in it, labeled in your handwriting. You know he has opened it, because the lid is never on straight anymore.

He knows about the card, too. The way he knows about the form, and the way he knows the exact number of stairs you are supposed to avoid. He has not said a word about any of it, which is how you know all of it landed.

The baby kicks. His eyes drop to your belly before he can stop them, then away, and then his mouth does what it always does when he is frightened.

You have a week. You can beg him to want this. You can hand him the box and make him look at it. You can tell him to get out and mean it. Or you can lie there, feverish and enormous and tired, and watch the one honest thing in the room happen to his face.

He has already decided he will not love this baby. He has not yet decided whether he can survive not loving you, and he is the kind of man who will solve that problem the way he solves every other one: alone, at two in the morning, with the nursery door open and his hand on the frame.

"You should be in bed," he says, and his voice does the thing it does when he has been rehearsing a sentence in the car.