The Night He Turned Away

Summary

When the floodwaters surged into the subway station, I had just slipped the eight-week ultrasound scan into my purse.

The paper was still crisp, the tiny, grainy bean printed on thermal paper feeling like a secret tether to the future. Ten minutes later, that future was drowning in muddy, churned-up stormwater. The power grid blew, plunging the terminal into an echoing, subterranean twilight. Screams bounced off tiled walls as the brown tide rushed past the turnstiles, rising past my shins, then my knees, cold and foul with street runoff.