I was too stunned to cry.

I lay there and I looked at my son — who had been in the world for less than an hour and had already been called a stranger by the man who was supposed to love him first — and I picked him up, and I held him against me, and I told him, very quietly, that he was wanted.

Someone in that room had to say it to him.

I was not going to let it be no one.

The nurse came back after a while — the same nurse who had unbuttoned the onesie, who I think understood more than she said.

She didn’t ask where the father had gone.