Morning came.
No call.
By lunchtime, my texts still hadn’t been opened.
By evening, his phone was going directly to voicemail.
The next day, fear finally drove me to his apartment.
His place looked strangely hollow.
Half of his clothes were gone.
His travel bag was missing.
Several things from his bathroom had vanished.
That was when I understood.
Caleb hadn’t simply needed time to think.
He had left deliberately.
I spent weeks waiting for an explanation that never came.
Then somewhere around the fifth month of my pregnancy, I stopped checking my phone every twenty minutes.
Grandpa Walter helped me do that.
My parents had died when I was ten, and Grandpa had been the person who raised me afterward. When I told him about the pregnancy, he never once asked why Caleb had left before asking what I needed.
He drove me to appointments.
He assembled baby furniture.
