I know my son’s fifty-one hours.

Not the way a mother in a chair beside an incubator knows them.

The other way — the way you know a thing you have reconstructed, out of three hundred and sixty-one pages, alone, at a kitchen table, over four years, because it was the only route available and because somebody put a box on a tray table and said read the card first.

It is not what I should have had.

It is more than I was meant to get.

His temperature at three in the morning on the third of March was 33.4 degrees, which is exactly where it was supposed to be, and a nurse named Petra wrote settled at four o’clock, and I know that, and nobody can take it off me now.