Chapter 1 — The Dream

Becoming a parent is a dream that does not come true for everyone, and I have learned, watching the people I love most, how cruel that fact can be.

For some people, the obstacle is simply that they have not yet found the right person to build a family with.

For others, even after finding the person they love more than anything, their own bodies become the obstacle, and the dream turns into years of treatments, and disappointments, and a particular kind of grief that most people never see, because it is a grief for a person who was never quite born.

My twin brother, Ethan, and his wife, Lauren, belonged to that second group.

I had already been fortunate.

I was a mother myself, and I will not pretend I understood, at first, the full weight of what they were carrying, because there is no way to fully understand a hunger you have never had to feel.

But I watched them, year after year, and watching them was like watching two people slowly lose small pieces of themselves.

Round after round of IVF, each one beginning with a fragile, carefully rationed hope, each one ending in another devastating disappointment.

And then, at last, the thing they had prayed for: Lauren was pregnant.

And then, at eleven weeks, she was not, and the small life they had already begun to love was gone.

That loss all but destroyed the two of them.

I do not have adequate words for what it did to my brother and his wife, and I am not going to try to find them, because their grief is theirs, and because this is not, in the end, a story about how they broke.

It is a story about how, against everything, they very nearly put themselves back together.

Chapter 2 — I Said Yes

By the time they came to me, they were emotionally hollowed out, physically exhausted, and holding on to the last of their hope with both hands, the way you hold a candle in the wind.

And then they asked me the question I had, if I am honest, quietly seen coming for a while.

They asked whether I would be willing to carry their baby.