For a second, I genuinely thought I had misheard him.

The whole room seemed to stop.

Lauren’s happy weeping cut off all at once.

“What,” she said, “the hell are you talking about?”

Ethan would not look at her.

He would not look at me either.

He gestured, stiffly, toward the small mark on the baby’s lower back — the mark the doctors had, in fact, quietly begun to murmur about, using a word I would come to know very well: spina bifida.

And then my brother pushed the baby, gently but unmistakably, back toward my chest, and he turned around, and he walked out of the room.