She looked at the cribs for a long time.

“They have three places where they can sleep safely,” she said.

“And a mother who has spent her last free weekend making them beautiful.

That’s not nothing.”

Years later, after the airport, Nathaniel asked to see photographs from the girls’ early years.

I considered refusing.

The memories were mine, built during a time when I had needed support and received none from him.

But the photographs were also part of the girls’ histories, and he would someday have to face what absence had meant.