My son got into a fight at school because another boy wouldn’t stop calling him his “brother.” I marched into that office ready to apologize for my kid’s temper. Then I saw the other boy’s face, and every bit of blood in my body went cold.
Eight years earlier, I’d been pregnant with twin boys. Labor came weeks too early, everything went wrong fast, and when I finally woke up two days later, there was only one bassinet beside my hospital bed.
One baby.
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I looked at my husband, Foster, and whispered, “Where’s the other one?”
He wouldn’t meet my eyes. “He didn’t make it.”
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I never saw a body. There was no funeral I attended. Foster told me I’d been too weak to handle any of it, so he’d taken care of everything himself while I recovered. I believed him, because why wouldn’t I have?
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From that day on, I poured every ounce of love I had into Milo. Years went by. By the time he started elementary school, I’d learned how to carry the grief without it swallowing me whole every single morning.
