“I was deployed. We were up in the mountains on a blackout mission — full radio silence, no comms in or out. No mail, no calls, nothing. Three weeks of it. Completely cut off from the world.” His throat worked.

“My wife was back home. She was pregnant. Twenty-four weeks along when I shipped out.” A pause.

“Something went wrong while I was gone. Placental abruption. It came on fast, and it was bad, and they had to take the baby to try to save them both.”

My breath caught. Twenty-four weeks. The far knife-edge of viability, the very edge of what a body that new can survive.

“They couldn’t reach me.” A single tear broke loose and ran down through the seams of the scar on his cheek and disappeared into his gray beard, and he did not wipe it away, because his hands were full of somebody else’s child.

“My wife went through the whole thing alone, in a room a lot like this one. And the baby — Clara — she was born fighting. Born fighting, just like this little bird here.” He moved his stiff, trembling thumb in a slow arc over the back of the sleeping baby’s head, the gentlest motion I have ever seen a hand that size make.