Part 1: The Boy With My Son’s Face
Labor came six weeks early, and everything after that is patchy in my memory — machines beeping, someone shouting for a doctor, my husband Derek’s face hovering somewhere above me looking more scared than I’d ever seen him. Then nothing, for two full days.
When I finally surfaced, there was one bassinet next to my hospital bed. One baby, wrapped tight, sleeping like nothing in the world had gone wrong.
I remember turning my head on the pillow, every muscle in my body aching, and asking the only question that mattered.
“Where’s the other one?”
Derek looked down at his hands instead of at me.
“He didn’t make it.”
I was too weak to push. I didn’t have the strength to ask what that meant, or how, or why nobody had woken me sooner. There was no funeral I attended. No tiny casket I ever saw. Derek told me he’d handled everything while I was unconscious because he didn’t want me carrying any more pain than I already had.
