If someone had told me a year ago that I’d be sitting in the back of a cab, clutching my last emergency $120, watching my husband walk into a building I’d never seen before… I would’ve laughed. Not because it was funny—because it would’ve sounded impossible. Like one of those “it could never happen to me” stories you read and shake your head at, safe in the belief that your marriage is normal enough to never crack in that particular way.

And yet, there I was.

I remember how the vinyl seat stuck to the back of my thighs through my jeans. I remember the baby’s warm weight against my chest, the way her breath puffed softly into my collar like she didn’t know the world had shifted under me. I remember my own nausea—pure, physical, like my body already knew what my mind was still refusing to accept.

But the truth didn’t start in that cab. It started in something smaller.

The way he said we made my stomach burn, because I was already saving. I was saving in the quiet, humiliating ways women save when nobody’s watching—stretching meals, watering down juice, washing secondhand baby clothes by hand, skipping lunch so the kids could have snacks later. I was saving in the way you don’t brag about, because it doesn’t feel like virtue. It feels like survival.

And that moment—his hand on mine, the yogurt still cold against my fingertips—was the first time I noticed something that had been creeping in for a while: