The second I lifted her into my arms, tears overflowed my eyelashes and ran down my cheeks and I did not wipe them away.

After everything Luca and I had survived, the years of grief, the long labor, the terrifying alarms, she was here at last, warm and real and impossibly small against my chest.

I counted her fingers, all ten of them, perfect.

I studied her face, the tiny nose, the delicate eyelids, the small dark wisps of hair, the faint crescent behind her ear that I noticed and thought nothing of, that seemed then like nothing more than a sweet small detail of a perfect child.

She was perfect.