And finally, a nurse entered my room carrying a tiny girl wrapped in a white blanket.
She had the softest, almost-white hair I had ever seen.
But it wasn’t her hair that made me recognize her as mine.
It was the moment she curled her tiny fingers around mine.
A DNA test later confirmed what the evidence had already established.
She was my daughter.
I held Lily against my chest and cried harder than I had ever cried in my life.
Daniel kissed our foreheads.
“We’re going home together,” he whispered.
Today, Lily is two years old.
Sometimes I look at her sleeping peacefully and think about how close we came to losing her forever.
And I still remember the little dark-haired baby I held that terrifying day.
She was innocent, too. She belonged in her own mother’s arms.
That day, two mothers almost lost their daughters because of one doctor’s greed. But both babies came home.
