PART 1
Thirty minutes after I brought our daughter into the world, my husband looked at her like she was evidence in a case against me.
I had been in labor for nineteen hours.
I was lying in that hospital bed stitched and shaking and hollowed out, still wearing the plastic band they’d clamped on my wrist when I’d come in screaming through contractions, and our daughter — Iris, six pounds and one ounce of brand-new human being — was bundled against my chest, her impossibly small mouth opening and closing as if she were tasting the air of the world for the first time.
I had imagined this moment for nine months.
I imagined Carson crying. I imagined him touching her tiny hand with one finger and whispering that she was perfect. I imagined him climbing carefully onto the bed beside us and saying the word family in that cracked, overwhelmed voice men get.
