I tried to answer and couldn’t.

Instead I heard my own breath catching, the kind of sound I’d made while waiting for an emergency C-section three months ago.

“Tell me where you are,” she said.

“I’ll come.”

She arrived twenty minutes later in a dusty blue SUV with two empty rear seats.

She didn’t make me recount the story while I wrestled with the car seats.

She simply held the door, took the diaper bag, and said, “You and the girls are coming home with me.”