“It’s perfect.”

We stayed like that a long while, the three of us, in the warm hum of the NICU — Edmund breathing against my chest, Rosalie’s hand over mine, the machines keeping their patient count of a small heart.

I thought about my grandfather, who had died when I was nineteen and just starting to believe the buildings were the point.

He’d have hated the man I became.

Not the success — he’d have been glad of that.