By that afternoon, my access had been restored.

It is remarkable how fast a hospital’s position clarifies once the ownership of the debt beneath its regional network is gently pointed out by a trust attorney; the custody ‘review’ that had been keeping me from my own children evaporated in under an hour, and no one mentioned it again.

They wheeled me down to the NICU, and I saw them for the first time.

A boy and a girl, impossibly small, wired and monitored inside their clear incubators, their skin translucent, their chests moving with a speed that terrified and amazed me.