“I don’t know.”
“Do you want to?”
That was the harder question.
That evening, after all four boys were asleep, I took an old file box from the top shelf of my closet.
Eight years reduced to paper.
Ultrasounds.
Hospital summaries.
Certified mail receipts.
Returned correspondence.
Birth records.
Photographs from the neonatal unit.
Everything I had preserved not because I still wanted Adrian to believe me, but because I wanted my sons to know one day that I had tried.
I sat on the floor and found a photograph of four incubators.
I was in the center.
Exhausted.
Too thin.
Smiling anyway.
I had been so young.
