Noah and I had been trying for a baby for three years. Two miscarriages. One long, gray winter when I stopped believing it would ever happen. When the test finally came back positive, Noah sat down on the bathroom floor and cried, and then he went out and bought a crib that same afternoon, even though I was only six weeks along.
“Too soon,” I’d told him.
“Nope,” he’d said, assembling it in the spare room with the instructions upside down. “She’s coming. I can feel it.”
He was right about one thing. She was coming.
He just had no idea how.
It started with my father’s heart.
When I was thirty-four weeks pregnant, my dad, Gene Whitacre, had a massive heart attack in his kitchen in Larkmont. My stepmother found him on the floor. By the time the ambulance got him to the hospital, the doctors weren’t sure he’d make it through the night.
