THE BIRTH OF LIAM
He arrived on a Tuesday.
Three forty-seven in the morning — I know the exact time because I'd been watching the clock on the hospital wall for the past four hours with the specific focused attention of someone who needs something to look at that is not the ceiling. The clock was directly in my line of sight from the bed, and its hands moved with the particular slowness of time during difficult things, and I watched them move, and I breathed, and I did what Dr. Yuen had told me to do, which was trust my body and keep breathing.
Jasmine had been there since midnight.
She hadn't left — not for coffee, not for air, not for the various practical reasons a person finds to step out of a room when the room contains something difficult. She sat in the chair beside the bed, and
