And I have never felt anything like what came right behind it, which was a love so total and so furious that it burned warmer than any cold could reach: a mother’s absolute, animal refusal to let her children’s first breath also be their last.

I did not know, in that moment, whether either of my children would live.

I want to be honest about that, because the ending of this story is a happy one and it would be easy to let that happy ending reach backward and make the vault less terrible than it was.

It was that terrible.

Kneeling on that frozen floor, I did not have the comfort of knowing they would be all right.

I only had the choice of what to do in the not-knowing — whether to surrender to the cold and let it take all three of us gently, which some exhausted part of me genuinely wanted, or to fight for two lives I could not be sure I could save, in a place designed to make sure I couldn’t.