The first time I watched my own funeral, I was holding my newborn son.
He was smaller than I had imagined he would be.
For months, I had pictured a loud, pink-faced baby with clenched fists and a cry strong enough to wake the whole maternity ward. Instead, he lay tucked against my chest beneath a soft blue hospital blanket, his breaths shallow but steady, his tiny mouth parted in sleep.
The nurses had placed a knitted cap over his dark hair. His skin was warm now, no longer carrying the frightening bluish tint he had when they rushed him from the operating room.
They had delivered him by emergency C-section less than an hour after Richard found me on that ledge.
I remembered pieces of it.
White lights above me.
Gloved hands.
Someone telling me to stay awake.
Someone else saying, “We’re losing pressure.”
Richard’s voice, low and controlled near my ear, promising, “You’re safe, Emily. He’s safe. Just keep breathing.”
Then a cry.
Small. Furious. Alive.
I had wanted to lift my head, to see him, to know for myself that my son had made it into the world. But my body had surrendered before my heart could.
When I woke the next morning, Richard was sitting beside my bed with his elbows on his knees and both hands clasped in front of him like he had been praying, even though I had no idea whether men like Richard Carter prayed.
He looked older than he had on the mountain.
Not weak. Never weak.
But shaken.
The kind of shaken that comes when life reaches into a locked room inside you and pulls out something you thought you had buried long ago.
“Your son is in the neonatal unit,” he told me gently. “He’s breathing on his own. The doctors are watching him closely, but they’re hopeful.”
I had tried to speak.
Only a rough sound came out.
Richard leaned forward at once, helping me sip water through a straw.
“What’s his name?” he asked.
My throat burned. My lips trembled. For some reason, that question hurt more than the broken ribs, more than the stitches across my cheek, more than the fact that the man I had married had pushed me off a mountain and walked away.
Because Michael and I had never agreed on a name.
He had dismissed every one I suggested.
Too old-fashioned.
Too soft.
Too boring.
Too much like your side of the family.
Now, with machines breathing quiet music around me and my body wrapped in bandages, I realized Michael had never truly been choosing a name with me. He had been passing time beside a future he never intended to keep.
I looked at Richard.
