APPARENTLY, THE STEROIDS saved Charlotte’s life. Taking Charlotte out so early definitely saved Elizabeth’s life. The placenta was killing both of them: starving Charlotte and sending her mother’s organs into failure. A 5 am call back to the hospital shattered my deluded hope that the growth issues from the increasingly frequent scans might just be constitutional, not chromosomal or placental. ‘Two small people wouldn’t make a big baby!’ But two small people shouldn’t make a baby that weighs 420 grams, either.

Pregnancy is a time for imagining what your life will become. The future is full of possibility. Having a baby at twenty-five weeks’ gestation is not one of the possibilities I’d imagined. Dreams of a potential life with three of us came within days of there just being one of us, bereft and alone.