For twelve years, my wife and I built a marriage around departures.

Departures from plans we’d sworn we’d keep and then had to move because the weather over Denver turned ugly. Or a crew got reassigned. Or a connection in Chicago fell apart and took the whole weekend with it.When you marry a flight attendant, you learn fast that time together is never simple. You take what you can get, and you stop treating the calendar like it owes you anything.

Laura used to joke that our marriage had more layovers than most flight plans.

But the truth is, it had romance too. We just had to fight harder than most people to keep the fire going. We’d celebrated birthdays over video calls with terrible airport Wi-Fi, her face freezing mid-sentence while I sang. We’d eaten anniversary dinners at ten at night because her flight got delayed by three hours and I refused to eat without her. One year we did Christmas morning with her still in full uniform, kissing me at the door before turning right back around and heading out to the airport.None of that ever made me love her less. If anything, it made me love her more, because I could see how hard she worked to come home to me at all.

But there was one thing all the miles and all the strange hours couldn’t soften.

We wanted a child.

That ache sat quietly in our marriage for years, and then it sat loudly, and then, toward the end, it got brutal. It touched everything. It got into the walls of the house.
And in some strange way that made it more precious to me, not less. Because I knew, better than anyone alive, exactly how close I’d come to throwing it all away. And because upstairs, asleep in a crib I had built with my own two shaking hands, was Amanda. The child we had begged for, and grieved for, and somehow, after everything, after all of it, been given anyway.

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