Two months after divorcing my wife because I believed our shattered marriage was destroying us both, I found her alone in a Chicago hospital.

Chapter 13

Maren was eleven days old when she stopped breathing.

I was not there. I was at a table in the cafeteria at 4:20 in the afternoon with a laptop open in front of me, on a video call with the partner nation, because it was the day I had to be a colonel for forty minutes, and I had arranged it with Aaron and Margaret and Dr. Raman like a mission brief. Margaret was with Sophie. Aaron was in the NICU hallway. I had one hour to be somebody else.

I had been on the call for nine minutes when Aaron appeared at the end of the table and said, “You need to come.”

I did not say goodbye. I closed the laptop mid-sentence and I ran.

By the time I got to the fourth floor they had her back. A nurse — not Osei, a young man with a beard — had noticed the desaturation and had bagged her and she had come back inside ninety seconds, which is a lifetime and also nothing.

Dr. Tolan met me in the hallway.

“Extubation failure,” he said. “She’s stable. We’re going to give her more time on the ventilator. This happens to almost every baby at this weight and it is not a sign that we’ve lost.”

“How many times does it have to happen before you tell me we’ve lost?”

Dr. Tolan looked at me, and I saw a man who had had this conversation four hundred times and had never found a version of it that did not hurt.

“Colonel,” he said, “I’ve been doing this for nineteen years. The baby in bed seven, whose parents you’ve seen in the hallway — she was born at five hundred forty grams and she is going home next week. The baby in bed nine is not going to make it, and his mother knows because I told her on Tuesday. I cannot predict which one yours is. That’s not a failure of my training. It’s the entire nature of what we’re doing.”

I went in. I washed my hands for two minutes. I put my finger on Maren’s back.

Her chest went up and down.

“It’s all right,” I told a five-hundred-eighty-eight-gram person who could not hear me. “It’s all right. You don’t have to hurry.”

That night I started the green notebook again, and this time it was not for Sophie’s counts.

This time it was for Maren. Every day, one page. Weight. Oxygen. Feeds in milliliters. And on the top line, always, the same thing, which I wrote before anything else because I decided it was the only number that mattered.

Still here.