I volunteered to be a surrogate and carried my best friend’s baby for nine months. The moment her baby boy was born, she took one look at him and said, “I can’t take him.” I became numb. I gave her a child.

She gave me a truth I wasn’t prepared to hear.

When my best friend, Rachel, told me she couldn’t carry a pregnancy to term, I was the one who said it first: “Let me do it.

Let me carry your baby.”

Carrying a baby in my womb for the third time felt like a strange, fragile wonder. Rachel came to every ultrasound, gripping my hand and calling her baby our miracle before he even had a name.I threw up throughout most of the pregnancy.

My mom and my two kids were the ones holding my hair back and keeping the house running while I worked.

Twenty-one hours. That’s how long labor took.

Every single one of them was the kind of pain that makes you bargain with things you don’t even believe in.

By the time they placed him in the nurse’s arms and he let out that first furious cry, I had nothing left.

No words. No tears. Just the hollow, wrung-out relief of a body that had finally finished doing the most enormous thing it had ever been asked to do.

Rachel was beside me the whole time, gripping my hand so hard my fingers had gone numb somewhere around hour 14.

The nurse cleaned the baby and wrapped him in a white blanket.