Part 1 — The Day I Thought the Worst Was Finally Over
The hospital grew smaller in my rearview mirror while my newborn daughter slept in the back seat.
For the first time in thirteen days, I allowed myself to breathe.
Thirteen days in the NICU.
Thirteen days of sitting beside a plastic incubator while machines beeped around me.
Thirteen days of watching nurses check monitors, adjust wires, and speak in those calm voices medical people use when they know a mother is barely holding herself together.
Thirteen nights of returning alone to an apartment filled with baby things but no baby.
Every evening, I walked past the empty bassinet beside my bed.
Every morning before sunrise, I drove back to the hospital.
And finally, my daughter was coming home.
Ivy Bennett.
Four pounds, eleven ounces.
Tiny enough that newborn clothes still swallowed her.
Strong enough to breathe without assistance.
Beautiful enough to make everything I had survived feel worth it.
I glanced at her through the rearview mirror.
One miniature fist rested beside her cheek.
Dark curls covered her head.
Her chin had the tiniest cleft in it.
And then there were her eyes.
One was a clear, almost startling blue.
The other was deep brown, so dark it sometimes looked black.
The doctors called it heterochromia.
Two different-colored eyes.
Unusual, but harmless.
“Usually someone else in the family has it,” the discharge nurse had said while helping me secure Ivy into her car seat.
Then she smiled.
“Do you know who she got it from?”
I had looked down at my daughter.
“Her father.”
Saying those two words had hurt more than I expected.
Because Ivy’s father had never seen her.
He hadn’t even stayed long enough to watch my stomach begin to grow.
His name was Julian Carter.
And Julian disappeared the same night I told him I was pregnant.
No argument.
No note.
No goodbye.
Nothing.
That was the part I had never been able to understand.
There had been no warning.
Julian and I had been together for nearly two years.
We had talked about moving in together.
Marriage had come up more than once.
He knew how I took my coffee, which movies made me cry, and exactly how to make me laugh when I was angry.
When I showed him the positive pregnancy test, he stared at it in Ali silence.
Then he looked at me.
“Are you okay?”
“I don’t know.”
He reached for both my hands.
