They were upstairs in the neonatal intensive care unit, in specialized incubators, impossibly small — and breathing, both of them, on their own.

When a nurse brought me photographs of their tiny, furious, red little faces, I wept until my bandaged chest ached, and they were not the tears of the vault.

They were the opposite of those tears.

My children had been carried into the coldest place on earth to die, and they had refused, the way their mother had refused, and they were upstairs right now, breathing air, alive.

Whatever else that night had taken from me, it had not taken them.