I closed the laptop and let myself feel it.

Blythe was eight months old, bright and round-cheeked and forever hauling herself upright against the furniture to attempt another wobbling step across the office rug.

She carried my name — the name Roderick had meant as a demotion and I had turned into an inheritance — and she would grow up knowing, in her bones, that she was whole exactly as she was.

I have come to love the particular irony of that birth certificate more than almost anything else in this story.