She was born on a Tuesday evening at St. Vincent Memorial Hospital in Lexington, Kentucky, after nineteen hours of labor, two epidurals, one failed attempt at pretending I was handling things better than I was, and a final thirty-seven minutes of pushing that left me certain my spine had separated from the rest of me out of self-defense.
She came out red-faced and furious, with a spray of black hair plastered to her head and the strongest little cry I had ever heard in my life. Noah cried when they put her on my chest. I laughed and cried at the same time, which hurt every muscle I owned. The nurse snapped a blurry photo of the three of us—me wrecked and swollen, Noah glassy-eyed and smiling, Wren looking like she had already judged us both and found us insufficient.
It should have been the beginning of an ordinary family story.
Not perfect. Nothing ever is. But ordinary.
Instead, by Thursday night, we were sitting in a private security office on the third floor with two police officers, a hospital security supervisor, and a detective from Lexington Metro staring at security footage from the nursery while my daughter fought to keep breathing three hallways away.
