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Having a child with Viktor felt like homecoming, like breaking the surface of some deep, dark lake. Like a culmination of more than a decade's worth of struggle against death and the demons that live within it. For both of us. I only realised how much he'd been keeping inside when he looked into our newborn son's wrinkly and purpled face, and burst into tears. Great, big, manly sobs of joy and howls of gratitude - they tugged at and unraveled the knotted bundle of my heartstrings, allowing me to cry as I hadn't at the birth of my other children.