She is not proof of anything.

She is not the answer to an insult.

She is my daughter, wanted and chosen and unconditionally mine, and she is the one thing I built in those eight years that has nothing of Adrian in it at all.

I think often about the woman I was when I froze those embryos — the version of me who did it in secret, told no one, and went back to carrying a blame that was not hers.

From the outside, she looked defeated.

She was, at that point, apologizing to her husband from hospital beds.