“I know.”
“You watched me sign.”
“I know, Emily.”
“Then why would you ask them to wait?”
Daniel wiped his face with both hands before answering.
“Because when they took her away from you, she started crying.”
His voice broke.
“She kept looking toward the door you had walked through, and I couldn’t stand it. I asked the nurse if I could hold her one last time.”
The nurse quietly added that Sophie had stopped crying almost immediately after Daniel picked her up.
Daniel looked at me then, and I saw the same man who had once carried our daughter through the hallway at two in the morning, thanking her for every cry because we had waited eleven years to hear them.
“She put her head on my chest,” he whispered. “And I suddenly realized how insane I had been. I was so afraid of losing her in ten years, or fifteen years, or whenever that day comes, that I was willing to lose her today.”
