They had entered the hospital as condemned parents, coached to accept a loss that hadn’t yet drawn breath. They’d been handed statistics instead of hope, risks instead of choices, and a script for how to survive a funeral no one dared schedule out loud. Yet when Nadejda’s first cry cut through the sterile air, it didn’t just surprise them; it exposed how fragile certainty can be when faced with a living, breathing contradiction.
No one rewound the months of dread, or gave Olesia back the future stolen from her body. Her womb, once a promise, was now a scarred boundary, a line that would never be crossed again. Still, as they carried their daughter past the same doors they’d entered in despair, the world felt rearranged. Nadejda wasn’t a miracle to them; she was a rebuttal, a small, fierce body shouting that even the most authoritative doom can be wrong.
