He stood in front of me, breathing, grown, with his whole life still ahead of him, and I understood that he was in the world because mine had chosen, in their last hour, to put him there.

I looked at Christopher for a long moment, this tall breathing eighteen-year-old with his whole life unspooling ahead of him, and I did the arithmetic that a mother cannot help doing.

He was here because they were not.

The trade had not been made on purpose — no one chose it, no one weighed one life against four — but the shape of it was undeniable all the same, and I found, to my own surprise, that I did not resent it.

I had expected to.