All I knew, that first night, was that a nurse I would never see again had told me the truest thing anyone would say to me for weeks, and that my son, feeding against me in a dim hospital room, was already, unmistakably, mine to protect.

The discharge, two days later, was its own small lesson in what my marriage had become.

There is a ritual to leaving a hospital with a newborn — the wheelchair to the door, the nervous first buckling of the car seat, the person who drives you home going ten miles under the limit while you sit in the back with your whole heart strapped in beside you.

It is supposed to be one of the great tender thresholds of a life.

I crossed it alone.

Romina drove.