“What if this time it’s a boy?”
I smiled.
I wanted to see him happy too. And maybe in that moment, I had already forgotten my own fears, my exhaustion, and the pain my body had endured. I was thinking about only one thing: if this baby was a boy, maybe Michael would finally come back home not only with his body, but with his heart too.
A few weeks later, I found out I was pregnant.
That news changed our home.
For months, Michael seemed like a new man. He came home more often. He played with the girls. Sometimes he even came into the kitchen to help me, asking what I wanted to eat, whether I was tired, whether I was in pain.
I saw the way he smiled secretly whenever he talked about the future. He thought about names. He said that if it was a boy, we should name him after his grandfather. The girls were excited too. They didn’t understand grown-up pain. They only knew that a new little baby was coming to our home.
