"Then what are you?"
Natalie looked at her. At this tall, furious, grieving young woman in a green hoodie, who had her mother's chin and her own father's long fingers and Ruth Hollis's eyes, though Ruth had given her nothing of her blood. She thought about what she could possibly offer.
"I'm somebody who knew her," she said slowly. "Before you. I knew her the day you were born. I don't think anyone else alive except your dad saw her that day. And I was thinking, on the way here, that maybe you'd want to hear about it. You don't have to. But I could tell you."
Claire stared at her. She lowered her hand.
"Tell me," she said.
So Natalie told her. She told her about Ruth in the delivery room at St. Joseph, holding her left hand for nineteen hours, never once letting go, even when Natalie, in the worst of it, dug her nails in so hard she drew blood. About Ruth singing under her breath, off-key, some old song about a river, to keep Natalie breathing in rhythm. About the moment Claire was born, and Ruth had not rushed forward, had not reached for the baby, had stepped back instead, against the wall, with both hands over her mouth, to let Natalie hold her first. About Ruth in the hallway afterward, sitting on the floor with her back to the wall and her knees up, sobbing, while Martin crouched beside her, and Natalie had seen them through the half-open door and understood that she was watching someone receive the thing she had prayed for for eleven years, and that it was costing her something to receive it this way, from a frightened girl, and that she knew it.