And then it all came back at once — the vault, Victor’s calm voice in the speaker, my sister’s face in a photograph — and I tried to sit up, and one word came out of me before any other.

“My babies.”

Marcus rose from a chair by the window, where he had, I learned, been sitting all night.

“They’re alive, Clara,” he said.

“Both of them.

They’re right upstairs.”

My daughter, Maya, had been born weighing barely three and a half pounds.

My son, Liam, just over three.