I used to believe that hospital walls were built of more than just brick and mortar. I thought they were infused with a kind of secular sanctity—a place where the world’s cruelty was paused at the sliding glass doors. I believed that giving birth was the ultimate finish line, the moment where the struggle ended and the peace began. I believed that the word “family” was a synonym for “shield.”
I was wrong. I was dangerously, catastrophically wrong.
The fluorescent lights of Room 614 were a surgical kind of cruel. They didn’t just illuminate; they dissected. They stripped away the shadows I wanted to crawl into, exposing the raw, trembling wreckage of my body. Labor had been a thirty-six-hour war, a physical demolition that left every muscle feeling as though it had been unspooled and rewoven by clumsy hands. My head was a heavy, drifting buoy in a sea of postpartum hormones and high-grade painkillers, struggling to anchor itself to the reality of the linoleum floor.
Beside my bed, in a transparent plastic bassinet that looked far too fragile for the treasure it held, lay Emilia.
