When Sophia arrived, Beatrice did not come to the hospital at all.

And when Maya was born, my fourth daughter, my mother-in-law stood at the foot of my bed, looked at my perfect newborn, and asked me, out loud, “And who is going to inherit the company one day, if you can only produce girls?”

Produce. As though I were a machine that had malfunctioned four times.

That single obsession — the male heir, the son, the boy to carry the name — was the acid that had been slowly dissolving my marriage and my family for sixteen years, and I had spent all sixteen of them trying to hold the pieces together, trying to love my daughters loudly enough to drown out the message they were absorbing from their own grandmother: that they were four failed attempts at a boy.

I told them, over and over, that they were not attempts at anything, that they were the whole point, that they were miracles, each of them, exactly as they were.

And I meant it with my entire soul.