And then a thought occurs to me. My brain was so foggy when I woke up, I didn’t even think of it. “Sam, the baby…” I feel like I’m choking. “Is the baby… dead?”

A ghost of a smile touches his lips. “No, they managed to deliver him safely. He’s in the neonatal ICU. Doing okay.”

“Oh.”

I exhale, thinking of our tiny baby, hooked up to monitors in an incubator. I dreamed of that baby for so long. I already love him a little bit, even though I’ve never even seen him. But after what Monica did to us…

“It’s okay,” Sam says suddenly.

“What’s okay?”

His brown eyes are sad. “If you don’t want him. I get it.”

“Sam…”

“No, really,” he says. “After everything that happened, I’d understand if… well, you know. Anyway, we’ll work something out.”

I try to sit up in bed, but my head throbs. I lie back down again, knowing I’m going to be chained to this bed for at least another day. “Do you want him?”

“Of course I do.”

Of course he does.

He’s quiet for a moment. When he speaks again, his voice has a tinge of excitement: “Do you want to see a picture?”

I nod.

Sam whips out his cell phone and it takes him seconds to bring the image up on the screen. He holds his phone up for me, and I squint at the newborn baby on the screen.

He’s tiny. Painfully tiny and helpless and adorable, like the newborn I always dreamed of. He’s got oxygen prongs in his tiny nose and he’s wearing a little white hat and sweater that are really small, yet still impossibly big on him. I can make out five perfect little fingers on his left hand.

“He looks like you,” I say to Sam.

I always thought it was ridiculous when people said babies look like adults. All babies look like little old men. (Yet the converse isn’t true—old men don’t look like babies.) But actually, this baby really does look like Sam. Something about his nose and his lips.

“I thought so too.” He grins at me. “They let me hold him this morning. Just for a minute, but it was…”

He turns his head away. He’s trying not to get too excited. The mother of this child tried to murder us both, after all. But really, there’s only one right thing to do.

“I want him too,” I say.

Sam’s eyes light up. “Yeah?”

“Of course I do. He’s adorable, he’s beautiful, and he looks like you.”

I don’t say the last thing I’m thinking: And he doesn’t have a mother.

“As soon as you’re feeling better,” Sam says, “you have to come with me to see him. Okay?”

I can’t suppress a smile. “Okay.”