Ivo waited in the hall; no one from my family did, and I found I did not want anyone from my family there, and the absence that would once have grieved me felt instead like clean air.

I labored a long night, and near dawn they laid her on my chest, this red furious small person, and she opened her eyes and looked at me with Niko’s exact expression, that steady taking-notes look, and something in me that had been clenched since a July morning let go at last.

I named her for no one.

I had thought about naming her for Niko somehow, some feminine turn of his name, and in the end I didn’t, because she was not going to be a monument to a dead man; she was going to be herself, a whole new person, unburdened, and I would carry the remembering so she would never have to.

I brought her home to the house her father built, and I laid her down in the room he’d said should be the nursery, the one with the morning light, exactly where he’d pointed with sawdust in his hair, and I stood in the doorway and told him out loud, in the empty bright room, that she was here, that she was perfect, that I’d gotten her home.

It is the closest thing to a prayer I have.