When Daniel came home, I placed the test inside a small box and handed it to him. He opened it, stared at it for several seconds, and then looked at me with tears already filling his eyes.
“Are you really pregnant?”
I nodded.
He wrapped his arms around me, then knelt in front of me and pressed his face against my stomach as though our baby could already hear him.
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.
