The speaker hears secondhand how a young woman died after taking an abortion pill: a night of pain and cursing, a mother's whispered comfort, then silence. What makes the news hit so hard is the connection. The man who, by the account in the poem, promised to marry the dead woman once made the same promise to the speaker. She never said so aloud, but the thought keeps returning that it could have been her.
The speaker had left the relationship, and the poem suggests that decision may have saved her life. Yet she feels no clean relief. She is stuck between gratitude for her own safety and grief for the woman who, in her words, "probably took my place." The sheep image, a creature led to sacrifice, shows how she sees love here: something that demanded too much. The mood is uneasy and haunted. The repeated "Had I not left" circles back like a thought she can't shake, and the poem ends on that bleak, unresolved note.