I Carried a Baby for My Twin Brother. When He Saw His Newborn Daughter, He Said He Could Not Take Her Home

For the first time I could remember, I didn’t call him back.

When I returned to the room, Hannah was asleep in a chair beside the bassinet, her notebook open in her lap.

One page was headed QUESTIONS FOR THE SPECIALIST.

Under it she had written, in increasingly hurried handwriting, Will she be comfortable?

How will we carry her?

Can we still bring her home?

I pulled a blanket over Hannah’s shoulders.

Then I sat where Lucas should have been sitting, listening to the quiet machinery in the corridor and wondering how a family could begin with so much hope and become so uncertain in a single night.