That night we stayed awake talking about names, birthdays, school, Christmas mornings and all the ordinary moments we had dreamed about for more than a decade.
When we learned we were having a girl, Daniel bought a tiny pink cardigan before we even got home.
“I’ve waited eleven years to buy something for my daughter,” he told me.
We named her Sophie.
When she was finally born, I had been in labor for almost eighteen hours. The second I heard her cry, everything we had been through suddenly felt worth it.
The nurse placed Sophie against my chest, and I remember looking down at her tiny face and thinking, So this is who I was waiting for.
Daniel stood beside me crying openly.
“She’s beautiful,” he whispered.
For the first months, our house was finally full of all the things we had once wished for—bottles by the sink, tiny clothes in the laundry, toys on the floor and a baby waking us in the middle of the night.
Sometimes Daniel carried Sophie through the hallway at two in the morning and whispered, “Cry all you want, sweetheart. We waited eleven years to hear you.”
That is why what happened later hurt so much.
Around Sophie’s first birthday, doctors became concerned that she wasn’t growing normally. Her weight remained unusually low, her hair began thinning, and after several appointments we were sent for genetic testing.
