Prologue
Prologue — The Harvest
Children are supposed to be blessings. At least that’s what Granny Gert used to tell me.
I think about that sometimes — how she’d say it with her hands deep in soil, coaxing life out of the earth like it was the easiest thing in the world. And every time she said it, I felt the irony of my own birth name tighten around my ribs.
My name is Bracha Levi. Bracha — Hebrew for “blessing.”
But Gwen… Gwen was the Levi family miracle. The one they prayed for, begged for, bargained for. After four miscarriages, my parents finally held on to her, tiny and fragile and perfect in their eyes. They thanked God for her. They thanked doctors for her. They thanked fate for letting her stay.
And then, three months later, her health began to decline.
I remember it the way you remember a nightmare — not in images, but in sensations. The cold fluorescent lights. The hush of nurses. The way adults whisper when they think a baby can’t hear words like failure, transfusion, marrow. I was not born yet, but I’ve heard the story enough times to feel like I was there, floating somewhere above the hospital bed where Gwen lay, fighting for breath.
The doctors told my parents the truth: Only a sibling could save her.
So, within nine months, they began trying again. Hope turned into desperation. Desperation turned into strategy. My mother’s body couldn’t carry another pregnancy to term, and my father’s vasectomy reversal wasn’t working fast enough.
That’s when they turned to science.
They took sperm from Mr. Levi, harvested eggs from Mrs. Levi, and fertilized them in a Petri dish. Clean. Clinical. Controlled. And once she agreed to it, the woman who would become my nanny agreed to be the vessel.
I know — harsh word. But it’s what she was.
Gwen was conceived out of love. I was manufactured for harvesting.
I don’t say that with bitterness. Bitterness requires surprise, and I’ve never been surprised by what I was made for. Even now, speaking from the safety of years and mountains and distance, I can still feel the truth of it humming under my skin.
My parents didn’t celebrate my conception. They strategized it.
They didn’t choose my name. They assigned it.
They didn’t wait for me with joy. They waited for me with charts, schedules, and medical projections.
And when I was born — full‑term, healthy, strong — they didn’t hold me first. The doctors did.
I remember the story of that day the way some people remember their first memory: my mother crying with relief, my father thanking the surgeon, Gwen sleeping in a nearby crib, pale but alive.
And me — swaddled, silent, unaware of the role I’d been created to play.
The prologue of my life ends with a moment I do remember, even though I shouldn’t. A flash. A sound. A sensation.
The first extraction.
I’m an infant, barely days old. Hands hold me still. A needle enters. Someone murmurs “good girl.” My cry rises — thin, startled, instinctive — and is swallowed by clinical efficiency.
That’s the moment I was born for. Not the birth itself. The harvest.
Everything that comes after is just me trying to rewrite the purpose they gave me.
