Maya slowly lowered her bag to the floor.
Just three days earlier, she had walked out of that same apartment, telling herself that she deserved to breathe again.
She was twenty-one years old, beautiful, restless, and used to being noticed. Before the baby, her life had been filled with loud music, late-night drives, cheap perfume, fleeting friendships, and men who loved her only until morning. She liked being the girl everyone called when there was a party. She liked the feeling of walking into a room and knowing people were watching her.
Motherhood did not fit into that life.
Her son had been born from a relationship that had never really been a relationship. The man had smiled at her for one summer, touched her as though she mattered, and disappeared the moment responsibility entered the picture. When Maya told him she was pregnant, he looked at her as if she had brought him bad news that belonged to someone else.
“This isn’t my life,” he had said.And then he made sure it wasn’t.
He blocked her number, deleted their photos, and left Maya alone with a baby she had never planned for and a loneliness she had no idea how to survive.
The people around her all kept saying the same thing.
“You’ll feel different once the baby is born.”
“You’ll become a mother the moment you see him.”
