That meant me in the mornings, Daniel’s mother-in-law on Tuesdays and Thursdays when she could come up from Beaumont, Daniel working from home three afternoons a week despite the strain it put on tax-season deadlines, and Megan finally accepting the kind of help she had once treated as evidence of failure.
If there was one useful thing the hospital had forced into daylight, it was this: she could not do it alone.
None of them could.
A week later, Laura came by the house with Emma and a small folded card.
I was there because Megan still didn’t trust herself to answer the door without shaking. Daniel was in the kitchen making a bottle. Noah was asleep in the bassinet beside the couch, one tiny fist loose by his cheek.
Emma stood on the porch in a denim jacket too thin for the breeze, holding the card with both hands as if it might save or condemn her depending on how tightly she gripped it. Laura stood behind her, expression careful and devastated all at once.
Megan opened the door but stayed just inside the frame.
Emma held out the card.
“I made this for the baby.”
Megan took it.
Inside was a drawing in thick crayon strokes: a round-faced baby under a huge smiling yellow sun, blue scribbles that I think were sky, and at the bottom the words, written with painful concentration:
SORRY BABY NOAH
Megan’s lips parted.
For one terrible second I thought she might cry so hard the child would think she had done fresh harm simply by trying to apologize.
