“Can I see them?” I whispered.

And the nurse looked away, and busied her hands with my IV line, and would not meet my eyes.

“There are,” she said, “a few things we have to go over first.”

I know now what that hesitation was.

She knew.

She had been on shift, or heard from the ones who were, and she knew that the woman whose babies she’d just described was, on paper, no longer married, no longer insured, no longer permitted to make decisions for the children she’d nearly died delivering — and she knew she was not the person whose job it was to tell me.

So she looked at the IV line and gave me the sentence hospitals give when the truth is above their pay grade, and I felt the floor of my relief drop out from under it before I even understood why.