“I know you were cold.” And somehow the baby seemed to settle at the gentle vibration of my voice, and I felt, for the first time in that whole long freezing day, something loosen in my chest.

Because this baby had not come easily.

For fifteen years, Julian and I had been unable to have children.

One by one, the women in my life had become mothers, had held their baby showers and shared their ultrasound photos, while I stayed trapped in a quiet, private limbo that I did not have the words to explain to any of them.

I will not detail the years of treatment I went through, the toll it took on my body and my hope, because those years belong to me and are not the point of this story; it is enough to say that I endured a great deal, over a long time, to carry the child I was carrying now, and that I had endured most of it feeling alone.