We don’t know yet.

That tiny sentence could have spared us hours of terror.

Maybe years of silence.

It became one of the most important sentences in our family.

Hope eventually had a daughter of her own.

Miles built his own life.

Julian stopped defining himself through Richard’s choices.

I stopped seeing Beatrice only as the woman who panicked beside the bassinet.

And the clover-shaped mark remained exactly what the dermatologist had told us it was years before.

A harmless mark on the skin.

Nothing more.

Everything else had been our story.

And once we understood that, we finally became free to write a better one.