The Child They Want

Julia — First-Person POV

I didn't tell anyone.

That was the decision. The one I made in the three minutes I spent standing in the nursery bathroom with the door closed and the tap running so the sound of my own breathing didn't give me away. The one I made while looking at my own face in the mirror — at the woman who had absorbed more than she had ever expected to absorb and was still standing, still thinking, still the person she had chosen to become rather than the person any of this had tried