The chapter shifts to 1974 and follows a young woman through late pregnancy. She wore thrifted maternity clothes, avoided people who knew the father, Zack, and endured public scrutiny and unsolicited advice. Two friends supported her: one who had faced a similar situation and became her emergency contact, and another who gave her a Baby’s First Year book and a stork card.

On the due date, she delivered a healthy baby boy who had Zack’s jawline and her eyes. Although the baby rooted to feed, she was not allowed to nurse. She handed him to a nurse, who transferred him through an attorney and caseworker to the adoptive mother, while she signed the relinquishment papers alone.

In the days after, her milk came in and she treated painful engorgement with warm compresses, describing the experience as a death without a funeral. She framed her circumstances: a twenty-year-old orphan in community college, surviving as a nanny and barely paying rent, convinced she could not provide for a child by herself.

Despite the practical reasons, she could not convince herself that placing the baby was right. She wrestled with shame, imagining alternatives—keeping the baby or choosing an abortion, which had recently become legal—but concluded that her decision emerged from impossible choices and survival calculations.

Life resumed its grind of work and study, sustained by Dr Pepper and Joni Mitchell, while debts and exhaustion mounted. Zack had already left, and she likened her son to a shell carried out to sea, emphasizing the finality and distance of the adoption.

She ended by describing persistent phantom kicks, as if the baby were still inside her, calling the presence a ghost without a death and underscoring her unresolved grief.