In December 2022, Miranda and her partner, Levi Langley, packed up the whole family, all their possessions and their pet chameleon and set out for Texas. It was time to come home.

The couple met at a Dungeons & Dragons game near Texarkana, in the northeastern corner of the state. Miranda, now 26, was a tattooed single mom with bright pink hair who had moved around a lot, seeking a better life for her two children; Levi was younger, goofier, very into video games, but easily stepped into a fatherly role.

The family had spent the last few months in Utah, where Levi, 25, worked as a coal miner. But after they had their first child together, they decided to return to this rural corner of the country, where Texas, Oklahoma and Arkansas meet, to be closer to Levi’s family. They rented an apartment in New Boston, deep in the East Texas Pineywoods, and Levi got a job at the nearby Tyson chicken plant.

…

During the ultrasound, Levi and his mom, Angela, watched the little digital screen, but Miranda kept her eyes on the tech’s face. She alone saw the moment it fell.

“She ran out of the room, and my heart sank,” Miranda said. “I knew. Something was wrong.”

This time, there was no weekslong wait for a follow-up appointment. Within a few hours, Miranda was sitting across from a maternal-fetal medicine specialist in Dallas as he pulled out a whiteboard and illustrated all the ways this pregnancy was headed for disaster.

The babies’ spines were twisted, curling in so sharply it looked, at some angles, as if they disappeared entirely. Organs were hanging out of their bodies, or hadn’t developed yet at all. One of the babies had a clubbed foot; the other, a big bubble of fluid at the top of his neck.

…

Miranda, who dropped out of high school but later finished her diploma online, was left to make sense of a horrifying medical diagnosis entirely on her own. What if she’d misunderstood? What if the doctors were wrong? What if some miracle occurred? What if the babies developed more and the glaring deformities turned into mild disabilities? What if — what if?

In the beginning, “there was a chance, and all of these things can be fixed,” she said. “Now, they’re unsaveable. I wasn’t sure I believed him. I didn’t want to believe him.”

There was no good option, and so, in the absence of information, or guidance, she ultimately decided not to decide.

Time passed, the window closed, and the pregnancy proceeded in accordance with Texas law.

…

Even with Miranda on Medicaid and Angela covering the gas and meals for these Dallas trips, this pregnancy was crushingly expensive for the young family. Levi’s sister organized a fundraiser, which helped.

“But there’s always more bills,” Levi said.

In late July, Miranda, 29 weeks pregnant, met with her maternal-fetal medicine specialist, the obstetrician who will deliver her, and, for the first time, doctors and nurses with the neonatal intensive care unit. Briefly, a pinprick of hope — why would they need a plan for medical care for the babies if there’s no chance they’ll survive?

But it’s more bad news. The NICU would be on standby when she delivered, prepared to do anything they could. But that was merely a precaution. She was still likely to get only a few minutes with the babies after they are born, if anything.

Disappointment flooded Miranda’s body. She was angry with her doctors for not finding an answer. She was angry at the state for not giving her choices. She was angry with herself for allowing hope to creep in.

“I had hope. I fought for them,” Miranda said later. “I tried not believing what [my doctors] were saying. And now, I have no other options.”

…

Instead of going back to her children, she allowed Angela to tuck her into bed. She turned off her phone.

“I fucked up,” she said, grief lacing every word. “I dragged them through this. At least I can be there to say hello and say goodbye.”

The day after the grief pulled her under, Miranda slowly bobbed back to the surface. She couldn’t afford to dwell too much on the babies inside her body; there were three children out in the world who still needed their mother.

All of Miranda’s children are named after Greek gods — Ares, 5, Artemis, 4, and Eros, 9 months. She had to get Ares enrolled in kindergarten, track down medical records from Utah and deal with Artemis’ persistent ear infections. She also had to find a way to parent her children through a tragedy she herself has not yet come to terms with.

Ares, with his first-day-of-school hair cut, is too smart for his own good. He had gotten used to the rhythm of pregnancy, and couldn’t wait to play with the siblings he was sure his mother would bring home. Artemis, who goes by Missy, quickly got over wanting a sister and now wanted to buy her new brothers clothes.

Miranda and Levi tried to explain death, God and heaven. They say the babies got sick inside Mommy’s belly and wouldn’t be coming home. But it was not clear how much was sinking in.

At the end of one of these heavy conversations, Miranda made an off-hand comment to Levi: “Maybe some gods are just needed back on Olympus.” That was the part that stuck. Ares told the neighborhood kids that his baby brothers were Greek gods who had to return to Mount Olympus, setting off a minor religious panic among the other parents.

…

After a few hours, the rest of the family left to get dinner, giving Miranda a quiet moment with the babies.

She’d ushered these boys into existence, gave them a safe home, helped them develop and brought them into a world in which they couldn’t survive. It was hard, now that she had them in her arms, to imagine a different path, with different choices. It was also hard to imagine she’d ever recover from the experience of holding her babies in her arms as they died.

She held them close. She stroked their cheeks and booped their noses and tried to project a lifetime of love onto their frail little bodies. She apologized to them, again and again, for any pain, any suffering, they experienced. Finally, at 8:14 p.m., four hours after they were born, their hearts stopped.

Helios and Perseus Langley died in the arms of the mother who loved them as best she could, as long as she could.