PART 1
“I’m sorry. I can’t take her home.”
Those were the first words my twin brother said about his own daughter.
Not “she’s beautiful.” Not “thank you.” Just that one sentence, flat and rehearsed-sounding, dropped into a delivery room that ten seconds earlier had been the happiest place I’d ever stood in.
I was still shaking from the final push when it happened. The nurse had just laid the baby against my chest — pink, wrinkled, impossibly small — and for one full second nothing else in the world existed except the sound of her crying.
Then my sister-in-law, Claire, started sobbing at the foot of the bed.
“She’s here,” she whispered, both hands over her mouth. “Daniel — she’s really here.”
My brother stood behind her.
He wasn’t crying.
He was just staring at the baby like she was a stranger who’d wandered into the wrong room. And something about his face made the hair go up on my arms before anyone had said a single word.
