I put my hand on my belly in the quiet of the examination room and let the relief wash all the way through me.

Because that, in the end, had been the only thing that ever truly frightened me, through all of it.

Not the humiliation, which I could bear.

Not the affair, which I had already known about for two months.

Not even Julian’s cruelty, which I had grown numb to over years.

What had frightened me was the possibility that their plan might work, that the cold and the strain might do what they intended it to do, that I might lose the child I had waited fifteen years and endured so much to carry.

And now, in a warm clinic, an unhurried doctor was telling me that my daughter was safe.