It is a common and dangerous kind of faith.

You can live for years beside someone, loving the version of them you have imagined, and never learn who they are until the night the fever spikes and you find out, in the space of a few hours, whether the person you married will stand or run.

Chapter 4 — The Waiting Room

By two in the morning we were still in the crowded waiting area of the emergency room, and Hazel had cried herself hoarse.

That was the sound that undid me, hour by hour: her strong outraged newborn crying wearing down into something thin and broken and weak, little rasping sounds that twisted my stomach every time, the sound of a baby too tired and too sick to cry properly anymore.