Grace cleared a space in the debris on the floor—laundry that she hadn’t done, books and magazines that she hadn’t read—then sat down cross-legged and slit the envelope open with her thumb, ignoring the sting of the inevitable paper cut that followed.
A letter and two photos tumbled out, and Grace caught one of the photos before it could hit the floor. It was a picture of a baby, fat and not as red and wrinkly as Grace remembered her being.
It was Peach, her eyes cool and clear as she looked at the camera, and she was so perfect.
Grace stared at the photo for a full minute before picking up the piece of stationery that had tumbled to the floor. It was personalized, Milly Johnson scrawled in a trendy pink-colored font at the top, and it took Grace a beat before realizing who Milly Johnson even was.
Peach had her own stationery. Grace would have never thought to give her that. She wondered how many other things she would have forgotten, both big and small, things that she wouldn’t have even known that Peach needed until it was too late.
Dear Grace, the letter began.
We know we agreed to send emails regularly, but we thought our first update should be a handwritten letter for you. Anything else seemed a bit too impersonal.
From the depths of our hearts, we cannot begin to thank you for the beautiful, precious gift that you have allowed us to bring into our lives. Milly has been a joy from the very first moment we laid eyes on her, and our love for her has only grown deeper and more vast as the days have progressed. We can’t wait to see who she becomes, how she changes. Our hearts are too full, our cups runneth over, as the saying goes.
Within that love, however, is an immense gratitude for the love that you have also bestowed upon Milly, and for the sacrifice you made for our family. We tell Milly every single day that her biological mother is brave and beautiful and loved her in ways that we will never be able to describe to her, and we will always want her to know you, to know about you and the selfless way that you have brought her into this world.
We can only imagine the conflicting emotions that you might have had in the past thirty days, but please know that we cherish and adore Milly more than anything else in the universe, that she is our baby girl, but that she was once yours, too, and that the grace of your gift will never be forgotten.
With our warmest wishes and deepest gratitude for you and your family,
Daniel, Catalina, and Amelía (Milly)
Grace read it again, and then once more. Each word felt like it was being engraved at the base of her heart, cutting into her, burning, and she picked up the second photo and turned it over. “Amelía Johnson, four weeks old” had been written in careful script on the back. On the front, Peach was wearing a little sailor outfit, complete with a teeny hat and itty-bitty boat shoes, and Grace picked up both photos and carefully tucked them under her shirt, pressing them against her stomach, where Peach had once been.
She knew it was ridiculous, that they were just photos, that Peach would never be anchored to Grace the way she once had been, but she tried to feel it again anyway, tried to remember the press of her tiny foot against Grace’s ribs, the way she would drum her fists at three in the morning.
But in the end, they were just photos, and Grace finally took them away and placed them in a drawer, feeling foolish. She wanted to look at them forever, and she never wanted to see them again. The letter she folded up and tucked into the back of her sweater drawer, right where her favorite sweater was, the one she had worn when she was pregnant, its knit soft and warm.
Grace knew that she couldn’t go back, but as she stood in her messy room, one hand over her stomach as if to keep Peach there, she also realized that she had no idea how, exactly, to go forward.
MAYA
Maya’s dad moved out on Sunday morning.
At first, he had promised that he wouldn’t move out for a while, that they were still in the beginning phase of “planning the separation,” which Maya thought made it sound like her parents were about to extract