At fifteen minutes her fists, which had been clenched white since I came on shift, uncurled, one finger at a time, and lay open against his chest.

By twenty minutes she had gone quiet.

By thirty, her breathing had changed — I watched it happen, watched her small chest find his rhythm and match it, rise for rise and fall for fall, until the two of them were breathing as one thing — and she sank into a sleep so deep and so complete that for a second my own eyes stung looking at it.

The silence in the unit was enormous. The alarms had cleared. The lights on her monitor had gone from that frantic red to a slow, even green.

And in the chair, the man who a half-hour before had been drowning in his own panic sat with his eyes closed and his face bent down toward the blue swaddle, and his hands — I noticed it suddenly — his hands had stopped shaking.

He had reached into his own trauma, into the exact mechanism that let him survive the worst thing a body can go through, and he had used it to pull her back from the edge of hers.