"'You spent the night with another man,'" he said. Flat. Informational. The prosecutor's delivery. "'While pregnant. You think I'm going to just—'"
"'This child is YOURS.'"
Her hand.
She hit his.
The sharp, decisive, full-palm slap of her hand coming down on top of his hand on her belly — not violent, the precise, definitive, get-your-hand-away-from-this quality of it. She knocked his hand off her belly with the motherly authority of a woman who has just discovered where her last boundary was.
The sound of it.
Small. The flat, palm-to-hand sound of it.
They both looked at it — at her hand where his hand had been, at his hand now at his side, at the moment that had just happened between them.
His mouth.
Something happened at the corner of it. Not a smile — the bitter, compressed quality of someone whose mouth was moving without being told to.
"'Now you're protesting,'" he said.
Quiet. The faintest, most devastating quality of something almost like derision.
