I do not remember ever being happier in my life than I was that day.
My mother had been gone from my sight since morning. I had not been allowed to see her, and though my father and my brother kept trying to reassure me, I could not stop worrying. They told me she was fine, that everything was as it should be, that she was simply going through what she had to go through. I knew, at least vaguely, what that meant. I was not so young that I understood nothing at all. But knowing did little to calm me. The hours dragged on endlessly, and with every one of them my worry only deepened.
Yet beneath that worry was something else too, something bright and trembling that would not leave me.
Excitement.
Mother had promised me a little brother.
