I don’t remember much of the ambulance ride. I’d started to bleed. A lot. My neighbor Tracey had the good sense to dial 911. She sat with me in the back. Held my hand while EMTs cut off my suede maternity pants and barked out commands that frightened me. Where were the words of reassurance, the assertions that this was a minor mishap, Your baby is fine, nothing to worry about, ma’am.

I lost consciousness at the hospital. Michael arrived moments after the ambulance. According to my neighbor, he had such a tight grip on my hand, the doctors had to pry his fingers from mine to wheel me in for the emergency C-section.

Then, ready or not, Evan Michael Oliver was born into the world.

Evan weighed three pounds four ounces. When I first met him, he was the size of a kitten, lying in the middle of the isolette with half a dozen wires and tubes dangling from his tiny, wrinkled body. He was covered with fine hair, and so translucent he appeared blue, but that was really the color of his veins, spun out like fine lace beneath the surface of his skin.

He needed the incubator for warmth, a ventilator attached to a blender to help him breathe, and a feeding tube to deliver essential nutrients. He required a blood pressure monitor and a cardiorespiratory monitor. Then there was the drainage pump, the IV, and various other lines that came and went as Evan struggled to fight off infection while still developing properly working internal organs.

He lived in the enclosed isolette like a china doll in a display case. We could look, but not touch. So we stood for brief moments, shoulder to shoulder, filled with that terrible sensation you get when things aren’t just wrong, they are WRONG, and you keep waiting for the situation to end, even as specialists yap at you.

The grief counselor kindly offered to call our parents. “You don’t have to go through this alone. Reach out to your community, lean on your families and friends.”

Michael, stone-faced, never replied. Finally, the counselor took the hint and disappeared. It wasn’t her fault we didn’t have families and friends—at least, not in the sense she meant. My mother had never forgiven me for becoming more beautiful than her, while Michael’s siblings spent more time in than out of jail. We’d given up on everyone years ago. We had each other, and that, we constantly reminded ourselves, was enough.