I looked at the name on the phone.
Remi. Quiet strength.
Twenty-five years of not knowing that was what I was carrying. Of fourteen placements and practiced exits and not being entirely sure I was allowed to take up the space I was in. Of building things quietly and letting them speak. All of it in a name I'd been given before I could speak at all, by a woman who had died before I was born, through a father who had put it in a record knowing he was going to have to give me up.
I looked at Dax.
"If we have another girl," I said.
"Remi," he said. Immediately. Before I'd finished. The man who had added it to the list at four in the morning on an island and clearly had not been uncertain about it since.
"You didn't hesitate," I said.
"I've been certain since the island," he said.
"And
