Her name was Rose.
We decided it in the hospital, in the hours after, not because we had planned to use it, we had a short list and this name had been on it but not definitively, but because when she was there, present and particular and entirely herself in the way that new people are entirely themselves from the first moment, the name arrived with the certainty of something that had been true before we said it.
Rose Hargrove.
She was born at four seventeen in the morning on the seventeenth of September, which meant she arrived in the particular dark that exists just before the dark begins to lighten, the in-between hour, and I thought that was appropriate, that she was an in-between person, born of two people who had each been in an in-between place when they found each other.
Damien
