“Just be careful,” Delphine said. “You gave up six months of your body for her. She owes you more than one careful conversation.”
I understood her anger, even shared some of it privately, though I wasn’t ready to carry it the same way she was.
“I know,” I said. “I’ll be careful. I promise.”
I hung up that call feeling caught between two versions of myself, the one that wanted to protect Paige the way I always had, and the one Delphine had just given permission to finally feel angry too.
We met for coffee at a small place downtown, neutral ground neither of us had strong memories attached to yet.
“I keep thinking about that moment,” Paige said, stirring a coffee she wasn’t drinking. “Walking into that room. I keep replaying it, trying to find a version where I react differently.”
“You can’t rewrite it,” I said. “None of us can.”
“I know,” she said. “I just hate what it revealed about me. That my first instinct, under pressure, was rejection instead of love.”
“Your first instinct was shock,” I said. “There’s a difference, even if it didn’t feel that way from where I was standing.”
“Does it feel that way to you now?” she asked. “Looking back?”
I thought about it honestly before answering.
“Mostly,” I said. “Some days less than others. I’m working on it.”
“I don’t blame you for that,” she said. “I’d worry more if you weren’t working on it at all.”
Paige reached across the table and took my hand, the first time either of us had touched since the hospital.
“Thank you for not giving up on this,” she said. “On us, I mean.”
“We’re two halves of one whole,” I said, echoing words she’d said to me two years earlier, back when this whole arrangement was still just an idea and a desperate hope. “I wasn’t about to let one bad hour undo forty years.”
She cried a little at that, quietly, into her untouched coffee.
We sat there another half hour, not saying much else, just letting the silence between us finally feel comfortable again instead of loaded.
Her daughter, whom they’d named Ember, grew alongside Iris in a strange, unplanned parallel, two babies born the same week from swapped embryos, growing up in different households a twenty-minute drive apart.
Paige sent me photos constantly, Ember’s first smile, her first tooth, small ordinary milestones that felt anything but ordinary given everything it had taken to get there.
I sent her photos too, whenever Bridget shared them with me, Iris’s own small updates arriving through a slightly more careful, more circuitous channel.
Sometimes I caught myself staring at both sets of photos side by side, two little girls who existed because of the same catastrophic mix-up, both of them completely unaware how close they’d come to growing up in the wrong homes entirely.
I kept both sets of photos in the same album eventually, unable to justify keeping them separate any longer, two girls who’d started as one confused afternoon now filling up pages side by side.
