that will likely take considerable time and patience to fully soften.
June just turned one. She has her great-grandmother’s stubborn chin and Wren’s habit of narrating everything she does out loud, and watching her grow, entirely unaware of the danger surrounding her birth, has been one of the strangest and most healing experiences of my life—proof, somehow, that the story that began on that porch didn’t have to end there.
I still have that old cracked phone. It sits in a small fireproof box in my closet now, alongside copies of the court documents, the medical records, and a single photograph of the four of us—Hazel, Wren, June, and me—taken in the hospital hallway the day everything finally came apart, all of us exhausted, none of us smiling exactly, but all of us, unmistakably, still there.
People sometimes ask me, when this story eventually comes up, how I found the
