I will keep this part brief, because it is mine, and because no one needs it described.

I did what a body in labor does, wherever it finds itself, because a body in labor has no choice and takes no requests.

I laid my sweater over a flattened piece of cardboard on the steel floor.

I remembered the breathing from my classes and I used it.

And somewhere in that frozen vault, in the dark and the cold, at thirty-two weeks, I understood that I was going to bring my children into the world in the exact place my husband had chosen for all three of us to die.

I have never felt anything like the particular horror of that understanding.