Now I lay under the care of people who treated my body as something worth guarding.

It was the same body.

The only thing that had changed was who was standing around it, and what they wanted from it.

So Dr.

Cabot brought on a team: four maternal-fetal specialists, names people in the field would recognize, watching over the two small hearts on that screen.

I lay there listening to them beat and I thought about all the nights I had grieved a body I’d been told was empty, and I had to turn my face away so the technician wouldn’t see what it did to me to hear that it never had been.