Later, after Miles fell asleep, I sat at my kitchen table and wrote a letter to the woman I’d been at four thirty a year earlier.

You are not weak because you’re tired.

You are not unreasonable because you want to be treated with respect.

You do not have to know every step of the journey before taking the first one.

I folded the paper and tucked it into the memory box.

Maybe someday Miles would read it.

Maybe it would simply remind me, on some difficult future day, that courage had once looked like a woman walking out of a kitchen with a baby strapped to her chest.

PART 25