Chapter 3 - A Sold Ring and a Silent Christmas
The plane hit a patch of turbulence. Nora woke and started to fuss. Naomi lifted her gently, and every instinct in me wanted to reach for my own daughter. I didn't. I had no right to act familiar yet. She didn't know me. That truth was almost unbearable.
Milo woke too, looked at me, then down at the red crayon still in his fist.
"You sit here now?"
"For a little while."
He nodded, then held the crayon out to me. I took it. "Thank you."
Naomi watched us, and her eyes filled. I almost asked if I could hold him. Instead I asked, "What happened after the NICU?"
She told me. The twins came home after ten weeks. Nora needed follow-up cardiac care. Milo had feeding problems that lasted months. Naomi moved from Portland to Milwaukee because her mother lived there and could help. She took remote contract work. She sold her engagement ring.
That sentence hit me like a fist. "You sold it?"
May you like
"We needed the money."
I closed my eyes. That ring had cost more than every medical bill she'd just described combined. She had been pawning jewelry to keep her children fed while I spent hundreds of millions chasing a piece of medical technology partly because of my dead sister — while my own premature twins fought for their lives in an incubator two states away.
