Chapter 1 — The Baby We Wanted

Mark and I had been married for three years when I finally became pregnant with the baby we had always wanted.

We had imagined that moment so many times, across so many quiet evenings, that when it finally came it almost did not feel real.

I remember standing in our bathroom holding the test, and then walking out to find Mark, and neither of us quite saying anything at first, just looking at each other, letting it be true.

We had wanted this for a long time.

We had wanted it the way you want a thing you have half-stopped believing you will get, and then, one ordinary morning, there it was.

And so we did what expectant parents do.

We talked about everything.

We talked about baby names, and nursery colors, and whether the baby would have my eyes or Mark’s smile.

We laughed about the names we both hated.

We debated paint swatches with a seriousness the situation did not remotely require, holding them up against the nursery wall and disagreeing happily for an hour.

We were, for a while, simply and completely happy, in the particular way of two people who have gotten the one thing they most wanted and cannot yet imagine that anything could take it away.

It is a specific kind of happiness, the unshadowed kind, and it does not know it is unshadowed, which is exactly what makes it so complete.

I did not know, in those early months, how little time we had left to be that version of ourselves.

I am glad I did not.

I would not trade a single one of those ordinary, unshadowed, happy days for all the warning in the world.

Chapter 2 — Cecelia

The names were their own small comedy.