And the appointments.

And the specialists, and the referrals, and the conversations that grew, week by week, more difficult to sit through, until we were in a room being told, gently, by a person whose job it was to say such things, the news that neither of us had allowed ourselves to prepare for.

Mark was dying.

They gave him no more than three months.

Three months.

I remember the number more clearly than almost anything else from that room, because my mind kept doing the arithmetic against the other number, the one under my hand — the weeks until Cecelia would be born.