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I look at her, honey-colored hair glowing in the morning light, puffs of cold air from her warm breath framing her beautiful face.

“Little Veda wants to say hi too,” she says, bouncing the baby—our daughter—wrapped in a blanket on her hip.

I take the baby from her, pressing my lips to the soft hair on her forehead.

Birdie looks at Huck and Lucy. “Van is running and warm if you two want to go get in.”

With their familiar yells and giggles, they leave us behind, zigzagging through the cemetery.

Birdie smiles, looking at the headstone. “She have anything good to say today?”

“You know Gran—she made me promise not to tell,” I say, laughing under my breath, palm running along little Veda’s cheek.

“I know how that goes.” Her brown eyes dance as she looks from me to the baby before leaning her head on my shoulder as we start to walk toward the van. She looks like an angel; they both do. So perfect it’s hard to believe they’re real. Hard to breathe. Hard to look away.

Yet—here they are.

When we got the news she was pregnant, she spiraled fast.

First, she had to figure out how this happened. When I playfully explained to her how babies were made, she didn’t laugh. Actually, she cried.

The explanation she eventually came to was simple: she read the numbers wrong the same day she told me I didn’t have to wear a condom.

Then came the part when she really came unglued. She printed out every statistic and study she could find on why having this child with her genetic mutation, at her age, was going to be the worst thing she could do to another person. She repeated the phrasea death sentenceon a loop. Sometimes through tears, other times gritted teeth. I’ve never seen someone stretch their neck as much as she did in those weeks.

I let her spiral. I listened and never argued.

Then, one day, when she was still sleeping, I took the one hundred sticky notes she had given me and put them on her nightstand in a stack with a note that said,Without your death sentence, I wouldn’t have these.

That day, she drove to my office, swung my door open, and said, “Let’s have a baby.”

So we had a baby.

Veda Rose Monroe was born in September in the middle of the night.

In some kind of weird pool.

“It’s a less shocking entry for the baby, Bo!” she argued.

I couldn’t wrap my brain around it, but once Birdie got something in her mind, there was no talking her out of it. With her in the water and me holding onto her shoulders from outside of it, she brought our daughter into the world.

Over the course of the year, Birdie’s days have changed. Sam moved in with one of his sons, and Mabel died one night from a heart attack…in bed next to her current muse. Birdie was sad, but she also said it was the only way for her to go.

She left Birdie two never-published manuscripts: one about a woman with too many rules who falls in love with a man who builds cabins, the other about a nun who fell in love with a groundskeeper.

In the quiet moments when she thinks nobody is watching, I see her reading them, smiling to herself. About me. Us. Love she never thought to believe in, a different life she didn’t know could be real.

With her clients gone, Birdie decided it was time to leave the career she had chosen based on her belief of never living to old age. “Time to focus on today, Bo,” she had said with a smile.

She turned Gran’s house into a classroom studio where she teaches all the lessons Gran taught her to anyone that wants to put their hands in the clay. She does especially well with kids and the elderly, a surprise to no one.

“Tell me something you like,” she says, smiling before leaning against me.

“Hmm…” I tap my chin, as if I don’t say the same thing every time she asks. “You.” I run my fingers through her blonde hair that looks like it’s glowing in the sun, adding, “Here with me.”

She smiles—somehow wider—like she always does.

“You?”