So when he and Claire sat me down at their kitchen table and asked, carefully, gently, like they were afraid I’d bolt, whether I would carry a baby for them, I didn’t even wait for him to finish the sentence.
“Yes.”
Daniel blinked. “Nora, you should really think about—”
“I have.”
Claire burst into tears right there at the table. They’d been trying for six years. Two rounds of IVF. A pregnancy they lost at eleven weeks that I don’t think Claire ever fully came back from. I already knew my answer before he’d finished asking the question. I had Eli. I knew exactly what that kind of love felt like, and if I could hand it to them, I was going to.
For the next nine months, they showed up for every single appointment. Claire kept a spiral notebook and wrote down almost every word the doctor said, like she was terrified of forgetting a syllable of it. Daniel held my hand through every blood draw because he knew I’d been afraid of needles since we were kids. They watched every ultrasound with the same look on both their faces — disbelief wrapped around joy, like they still didn’t quite trust it was real.
