When Alexa decided it was time to become a mother, she was thirty-five, never married, certainly single, and had recently bought the travel business. While she had plenty of female friends, she didn’t have one that could be counted on to talk through this decision without bringing all their personal baggage. At the time, her thirtysomething female friends were going through their own tribulations: finding a husband, staying married, conceiving a child, coming to terms with their sexuality or knee-deep in nappies because they had recently given birth and were overwhelmed. And she’d learned the painful lesson that everyone had biases to bring to a conversation about a single woman like her giving birth.

Over the years when Alexa had hinted at single parenthood, her friends had scoffed. Or rolled their eyes. Or, worst of all, lectured her about how incredibly selfish she was being, having a child on her own, without a father in the picture. Especially when there were so many “spare” children around, as if newborns were so plentiful they hung out in parks together, eager to be adopted by single parents. Wait, they all advised. You still have time to find a partner and do it the right way. Alexa knew she didn’t want a full-time partner, but she did want a child. And who was to say what constituted the right way? She’d certainly heard enough stories of terrible childhoods or awful fathers or miserable mothers to know that having two parents didn’t guarantee a happy life. She was enough for one little baby.

She thought of her mother often during those months and years of decision-making. A young woman whose family was so ashamed of their unmarried, pregnant daughter they shipped her off to a faraway island to give birth. Her mother turned that punishment around and made Patmos, her accepting new husband, and her four children her life. Alexa knew that she didn’t want to “avenge” her mother by having a baby on her own, that wasn’t the right term, although she did feel anger toward the grandparents she’d never met. She wished she had been old enough to have a conversation with Leni about her choices before the accident. But it never occurred to her as a teenager to speak to her mother about such personal things. But now, in her thirties and feeling an overwhelming need to have a child, she wanted her decision to honor her mother.

She knew what she had to do.