I stepped forward and held out my arms. “Give her to me.”
Daniel stood beside me, watching while I carefully bathed our daughter.
After a while, he said, “She’s stronger than we thought.”
I looked down at her. At the tiny line on her back. At the impossible fact that she had already survived something.
“She always was,” I said.
He rested a hand on the counter. “We just weren’t there to see it.”
“She’s stronger than we thought.”
I thought about the years it took to get her.
I remembered all the tears I’d shed in parking lots, clinic bathrooms, and the dark side of our bed while Daniel pretended to sleep because he didn’t know how to help.
I thought about all the times motherhood had seemed like a door that opened for everyone but me.
Then I looked at Sophia, slippery and warm in my hands, alive and stubborn and ours.
“We’re here now,” I said.
Daniel met my eyes in the mirror.
And for the first time since I saw that incision, the fear inside me shifted into something else.
I thought about the years it took to get her.
Because they had treated me like an afterthought. Like a technicality. Like motherhood was something I would receive once the important decisions were over.
They were wrong.
I lifted Sophia from the water and wrapped her in the towel, tucking it under her chin. She made a soft, offended noise, and Daniel laughed despite himself. It was shaky, but real.
I pressed my lips to the top of her damp head.
No one was ever going to decide again whether I counted.
I already did.
They had treated me like an afterthought.
RPV
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