After ten years of miscarriages, we finally had our miracle baby girl — but when the nurse handed her to my husband, he went completely pale, stared at the birthmark on her shoulder, and whispered, “No… that’s impossible.”

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“It’s just genetics,” Desmond told me, sitting down beside me on the couch, watching Iris sleep against my shoulder. “A family trait, apparently going back at least three generations before Iris. Nothing more complicated than that.”

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“How does it feel?” I asked. “Knowing that now?”

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“Lighter,” Desmond said. “I think some part of me needed to understand it as just biology, not as some kind of sign. I spent twelve years being afraid, without fully realizing it, that I’d somehow pass along whatever made my father leave, the same way he apparently passed along this exact mark without ever meaning to give me anything else alongside it.”

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“You’ve never once given me a single reason to worry about that,” I said. “Not in twelve years.”

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