Then, in the middle of all of it, something happened that had nothing to do with strategy, and everything to do with why I was fighting at all.

My daughter was born, healthy and furious and perfect, and I named her Mira.

Derek cried in the delivery room.

I watched him weep over our newborn daughter, and for one dangerous second — one single second I am not proud of — I felt the old pull, the terrible wish to believe that the tears were real, that a man who could cry like that over his child could not truly have meant to kill her mother, that there was some version of this where we were a family after all.

It lasted a second.