One year ago, we'd just finished a week beyond my telling, an eight day trip to Bismarck, North Dakota, to witness a birth and bring home a baby girl. We'd been there once a month earlier, to meet the birth couple, their rock band, and parents. They'd flown to our house a few weeks later. We all got along in a "meant-to-be" way that felt like new family, which given recent deaths and other losses, was most welcome.

Day One, we fly there with our car seat and baby clothes in tow. We meet Jamie and David for dinner and later google ways to induce pregnancy, since Jamie is more than ready.

Day Two, I'm at a breakfast trying to finish my last work on a two-year obsessive software project. I'm testing the last bug and my laptop battery dies. I walk across the street to the hotel and get a call from Jamie. She's in labor. Can we drive to their place.

We arrive and we're all amateurs, all of us. Decades apart in age, but equally freaked about what to do next. We go to the doctor and she confirms it'll be today. We go to the adoption counselor and sign some papers, though not the important ones. We go to the mall.

The rest of my life I'll remember walking that mall, with its everydayness surrounding our secret, that soon there will be another in our little group, and that she will be only slightly less confused than we.

We go back to their place to watch Jamie bounce on her birth ball. Her mom comes over. It's the first time we've met her. Her brother follows soon after. It's the first of many excited family members that day and night. Excited and saddened, since the out-of-town couple standing off to the side represent the impending sorrow in their joy, that we will take from them their blood.

We drive Jamie and David to the hospital. I'm making jokes and filming, and while nervous, we're getting along. It's the second-to-last time the four of us feel like friends.

Once swept into the hospital, we're again outsiders, explaining to people that we've a right to be there too, but instead confined to the waiting room while their brazen 20-something friends play solitaire loudly in the labor room instead of us. We spend the night chatting with two sets of grandparents, making light of things, on display, as they anxiously wait to welcome (and then grieve) their grand-daughter.

We try to sleep. I find a couch three floors down, and some blankets. Looking up, I can see and hear the hallways above me. I mark the time with clock chimes ... one, two, three o'clock. I imagine the muffled conversations above pertain to me. Is there a baby? No, it's a nurse. David's father sleeps near me, and I wonder if this scene will also live with me. The snoring birth grandfather, the chimes, the hallway corners above me like a Beatles album cover.

We wake and venture back. The nurse whispers that it'll be soon. Like naughty children, my wife and me join Jamie's mom outside their door. We're standing there, not caring that it's not allowed. Then a sound comes through clearly, a sound waited for and wanted, like a ringing telephone from a lost loved one, a sound that cuts through the stress and sadness and faltering hope of the previous seven years of childless grief, a sound of announcement, of impossible hope: a baby's cry.

My wife and Jamie's mom hug each other spontaneously, tightly, two strangers sobbing with joy, streaming tears together.

.. which is all I can write for now .. too hard to continue, which of course gives away the ending, so I'll skip to it:

Day Eight: they take the baby back.