And when the real baby arrived, small and red and dark-haired and utterly ordinary in his miraculousness, the gap between the fantasy and the child had been too much for Nicolas to bear.

So rather than grieve the impossible son who lived only in his head, he had reached for a story that let him reject the real one.

The dark hair wasn’t evidence.

It was an excuse.

He needed the baby to be someone else’s, because the alternative was to admit that his son was just a son, and that the thing he’d really been hungry for all these years was never going to come in a bassinet.

Chapter 8 — The Nurse