Chapter 1 — The Son He Wanted

Nicolas and I had been together eight years, and from the beginning we both said we wanted a big family.

But Nicolas had always been fixated, in a way I noticed early and excused for far too long, on having a son.

Even before we married, he would talk about how a house full of daughters wouldn’t feel complete to him.

He wanted a boy more than anything — someone to carry his name, to be the family he had always pictured.

I told myself it was just a way of talking.

I told myself a lot of things, in those years, that I would not tell myself now.

That the fixation was harmless.

That every man wants a son, more or less, and mine just said it out loud.

That the wanting would soften once children actually arrived and filled the house with the noise and mess of real life.

I was, I see now, doing the thing that keeps so many of us in the wrong place far too long: taking a warning and translating it, patiently, into something I could live with.

Chapter 2 — Four Daughters

Soon after the wedding I found out I was pregnant, and Nicolas was sure, immediately and without evidence, that it was the son he’d been waiting for.

Instead we had a beautiful girl.