She Called Me Six Times and I Never Answered. When I Found Out Why, I Revoked My Own Mother’s Access Before I Hung Up the Phone

Rosalie put her face in her hands and let go at last — six months of grief and loneliness and the particular ache of believing you’ve been discarded, all of it breaking loose at once in a hospital room.

I stood and gathered her carefully against me, around the IV line, and held her while she cried into my shirt.

“We’re going to fix this,” I said into her hair.

“I am not letting you go again.

Not you, not him.

Never again.”

Chapter 15 — Edmund

Two days later I stood in the NICU’s holding room in a paper gown with our son against my bare chest, skin to skin, four pounds of warmth breathing in the crook of my neck.