The first day, she didn't tell anyone.

She didn't tell anyone because she hadn't yet told herself.

It had started the week before, not dramatically, not in the way things started in the stories she'd grown up reading, where the body announced itself with clarity and the woman knew immediately and the knowing was the beginning of something with a shape to it. It had started quietly. A tiredness that was different from ordinary tiredness, the specific and particular quality of exhaustion that sat behind the eyes rather than in the limbs. A morning when the coffee smelled wrong, not bad, exactly, but wrong, the cardamom that she loved suddenly...