Blood. Month. She’d missed some periods. Don’t ask me how I noticed, I just did – I obsess over patterns, names, connections. Her moods during the last few months. Not wanting to be touched, wanting to be touched. No tampon wrappers in the garbage. Subtle changes in her face, breasts.

When I was seventeen, I was hospitalized for a urinary tract infection that was murder on my epididymis, the tube that transports spermatazoa from the testes to the vas deferens. For all intents and purposes, there’s nothing connecting my poor testes to the outside world…

Translation: I wasn’t the father of Mandy’s child.

I thought about her suicide, and almost fell for it: hormones might explain her erratic behavior at the end. Of course.

I pictured the rubble in the strip club bathroom, Slain’s torn body, my brush with death. I thought about Mandy’s body under the rubble and her dead child, pictured it in my mind-

I saw it. In my mind. Clearly.

Mandy wasn’t in the bathroom after the explosion.