But love without trust can become its own kind of betrayal.
I told him I didn’t know whether our marriage would survive.
What I did know was that my daughters would not pay the price for the choices we had made.
Three days later, I was finally allowed to hold them both together.
One rested against each side of my chest.
They were warm.
Fragile.
Alive.
And completely unaware of how close I had come to disappearing from their lives.
I named them Lily and Grace.
Not because everything suddenly became easy.
It didn’t.
There were specialists.
Appointments.
Therapies.
Questions about their future that no doctor could fully answer.
There were exhausted nights when I cried in the bathroom because I didn’t know whether I was strong enough.
But I learned something I wish I had understood in that hospital parking lot.
