"I had her for three days," she said. "In the hospital. I named her. They let me name her, for the original birth certificate. I named her Claire. Ruth and Martin kept it. I didn't ask them to. They just did."
She stopped. Adam had leaned forward with his elbows on his knees, his hands pressed together against his mouth. He did not say anything. Calvin, on his chair a little apart, did not move at all.
"On the third day," Natalie said, "Ruth asked if I would do something for her. She said she knew it might be too much, and I could say no. She said she wanted a picture. Not a snapshot. A real portrait. Of the three of us, with Claire. Before. She said she wanted Claire to have it. So that when she was older, she could look at it and see that I was there. That it wasn't a secret. That we stood together."
She looked across the room at Calvin.
"Ruth's sister had had her wedding pictures done here," she said. "So Ruth called. On a Saturday. And he said to come in on Monday morning, before he opened."
"The fourteenth," Calvin said quietly. It was the first thing he had said in twenty minutes.
"The fourteenth," Natalie said. "I was discharged that morning. We drove straight here from the hospital. I still had the bracelet on. Martin had to lend me his sweater, because I'd only brought a T-shirt and I was leaking through it." She laughed, a short, broken sound. "That's the sweater. The blue one. It's Martin's."