Fifteen years from now, the little unborn girl inside me will be with her friends, talking about saucy, pre-teen romance novels, and someone will come across the picture that I'm holding now. They will pick up the glossy Polaroid and wonder who the man inside it is, and wonder if he's still single, because he looks like someone they would want to date, if only to get more pictures of him, to capture all of the primal glory that he had in his prime. Elizabeth won't know that it's her father, and my husband.

I always liked looking at this picture. You can almost see an innocence in his eyes. Like he'd seen what he wanted to see, but he had never truly been on the other side of his own eyes before. He only thought of himself as young, eager eyes in a perfectly pressed uniform.