Beckett, who saw none of it, leaned down close to my ear.

“After today,” he whispered, “you and I can finally start over.”

I turned my head, slow, and looked at him.

“Funny you should say that.” His smile flickered — but then the next contraction took me, and the surgical team closed in, and there was no more time for him to wonder what I’d meant.

A while later, without any of the disaster he had paid for, my daughter was born, whole and furious and loud.

When they laid her on my chest and I heard her scream, I wept — not from the pain of it, but from the plain enormous fact that the two of us had lived to see the morning.