is the sound, nearly forty minutes later, of a thin, furious cry filling the operating room.
“A girl,” Dr. Osei told me, her voice warm despite the exhaustion of the emergency procedure. “Small, but she’s got a strong set of lungs on her. We’re going to get her checked over in the NICU as a precaution, but her early signs look good.”
I cried harder at that than I had at any point that entire day—not from fear this time, but from a fierce, overwhelming relief that the daughter Grady and Pauline had already decided to resent before she’d even taken her first breath was, in fact, alive and furiously, healthily crying.
I named her June, after my own grandmother, a woman who had, decades earlier, left an unhappy marriage of her own and rebuilt a life entirely on her own terms—the kind of quiet, hard-won courage I hoped, somehow,
