I had never once, in all that time, understood that the building was not the point.

“Then I will spend the rest of my life,” I said, “learning how to stay.”

Chapter 13 — Eighteen Days

Christopher stayed in the neonatal unit for eighteen days, and I was there for nearly every hour that mattered.

I learned to hold his tiny body without tugging a single monitor wire.

I learned to warm his small bottles.

I learned the difference between the ordinary beeps of the machines and the urgent ones, a fluency I had never imagined acquiring, and came to treasure more than any contract term I had ever memorized.

Somewhere in those eighteen days, I discovered that a four-pound baby could become, without the slightest effort, the entire center of a grown man’s universe.