Worth the rare moments of tragedy.

The father gently caressed his baby’s cheek. He was a beautiful man, Nurse Matthews decided. Tall, dark, broad-shouldered, a classic jock. Just the way she liked them.

She blushed. What on earth was she doing? She had no right to think such things. Not at a time like this.

The father thought: Jesus Christ. She’s so like her mother.

It was true. The little girl’s skin was the same delicate, translucent peach as the girl he’d fallen in love with all those years ago. Her big, inquisitive eyes were the same pale gray, like dawn mist rolling off the ocean. Even her dimpled chin was her mother in miniature. For a split second, the father’s heart leaped at the sight of her, an involuntary smile playing around his lips.

His daughter. Their daughter. So tiny. So perfect.

Then he looked down at the blood on his hands.

And screamed.

Alex had been so excited that morning when Peter drove her to the hospital.

“Can you believe that in a few short hours she’ll be here?”

She was still in her pajamas, her long blond hair tangled after a fitful night’s sleep, but he didn’t think she’d ever looked more luminous. She wore a grin wider than the Lincoln Tunnel, and if she was nervous, she didn’t show it.

“We’re finally going to meet her!”

“Or him.” He reached over to the passenger seat and squeezed his wife’s hand.

“Uh-uh. No way. It’s a girl. I know it.”

She’d woken up around six with fairly mild contractions and insisted on waiting another two hours before she would let him drive her to Mount Sinai. Two hours in which Peter Templeton had walked up and down the stairs of their West Village brownstone sixteen times, made four unwanted cups of coffee, burned three slices of toast and yelled at his son, Robert, for not being ready for school on time, before being reminded by the housekeeper that it was in fact mid-July, and school had been out for the last five weeks.