Whether I would be their surrogate.

I did not need time to think about it.

I said yes, right there, before either of them had finished bracing for a no.

How could I have said anything else?

I had watched my twin brother and the woman he loved fight for years for the one thing that comes so readily to so many, and be denied it, and denied it, and denied it again.

I had a body that had already done this once, that knew how.

If I could give them the family they had wept for, the family they had painted nurseries for in their minds a hundred times and never gotten to fill, then there was no version of me that would refuse.

My brother had been the other half of me since before either of us drew breath; we had shared a womb ourselves.

There was a rightness to it that I felt before I could have explained it.

And besides — and I said this to them, to make them smile, because they had not smiled in so long — at the end of all of it, whatever else happened, I was going to become an aunt.

I was going to get to love this child for the rest of my life.

That was not a sacrifice I was making.

It was a gift I was being given.

I have never, not for one single day, regretted saying yes.