There are moments in life when reality becomes sharper, colors saturated, the air almost palpable, when every second ticking by is heavy with significance. During these brief, breathtaking interludes, a slice of time in all its vibrant glory blazes its way toward the status of memory, even as you drink in each moment's passage. And you know that no matter how many times over how many years you take this memory out and examine it, relive it, dog-eared pages and fingerprints and all, its perfect clarity will never fade or dull because of the sheer brilliance in which it originally transpired.

Jen experienced this phenomenon as she lay in the operating room amid a flurry of activity meant to culminate in the most momentous event of her life. She was strangely calm, her thoughts slow and rational and deliberate, as if every day found her lying on her back with tubes and hands infiltrating her body, as she drew closer to a line that would forever separate the person she was now with who she would be when this was all over. Her gaze was fixed on Jack's face, upside down, taking in his set jaw, his pallor in the harsh overhead fluorescents, the birthmark on his cheek, every feature so familiar and so soothing in its familiarity that it almost made her want to reach out and comfort him. His eyes were focused on a spot Jen couldn't see over the paper sheet stretched mercifully in front of her face to block her view. She guessed it would take a hardier soul than she to watch someone slice their abdomen open like a freshly caught trout. The graphic thought prodded the ball of nausea that had settled uneasily on her chest, and she had to close her eyes and swallow hard to ride over the trembling green wave.

Grams was waiting right outside the room, per hospital regulations that allowed only one person to stay with the mother-to-be. She had arrived so soon after Jack's phone call that it seemed she must have been on standby in the lobby, just waiting for the news. Grandmother's intuition, perhaps. Jen's mother wasn't there. She had gone on a ski trip with two of her fellow middle-aged divorcée girlfriends three days before and wasn't due to return until the following Friday. This had slipped Jen's mind, but, she supposed, it didn't really matter. Jack was here, looking nervous enough to rid his stomach of the Snickers bar and Dr Pepper he'd scarfed down a few hours earlier—but here just the same. Grams was there, trying distractedly to work on her knitting project in the hallway, just a few yards of cold empty hospital space away.

And the baby Jen had been anticipating with equal measures apprehension and eagerness, dizzying self-doubt and childish hope, dread and reverance—the baby who might have David's eyes but who would never see them mirrored in his or her own—was coming.

David. Jen had seldom thought of the little one inside her without at least a fleeting flash of his face, or a fragment of memory from when things were good. Not good, she amended—passably complacent. Because when she was brutally honest, she knew things had never been good with him. In fact, Joey and Pacey, who had each spent years building walls against one another, were much closer to good in their bad moments, in their bickering, in the heavily laced and transparent distance of their encounters, than Jen had ever been with David. Or with anyone else, for that matter. She supposed that meant that what they had was real. She'd never experienced real.

Jack brushed a wisp of hair off her damp forehead and gave her a valiant—if visibly shaky—smile, and again she amended her thoughts. This is real, she thought, looking up at her best friend. Platonic, yes, but no less real for that—and perhaps, in the end, even better for its shortage of pain. She had watched Pacey watching Joey across the room when they'd had their reunion in Capeside, and seen the traces of pain that had etched themselves into him over years of pining for her. She had seen iron-willed Joey Potter dissolve sobbing into his arms in a public restroom. Real and painful went hand in hand. Maybe Jen was lucky to have been spared.

She could feel pressure beyond the sheet, pressure intense enough to make her suck in her breath and bite down on her bottom lip. Her heartbeat quickened, and the nausea rose again. This process of cutting and tugging and lifting and invading was going to finish making her a mother. These faceless strangers behind their blue masks were going to end something that had begun in a tangle of bedsheets with a man who should have loved her, who in a perfect world would have loved them both. They would fish out the child she had nurtured in her womb and would nurture in a world too harsh for one so small and innocent, they would suction her lungs free of the fluid that had sustained her and hand the baby, weak and struggling, bloody and naked and frightened, to Jen, for life. For life.

She didn't realize she was crying until Jack wiped a tear from the corner of her eye with his thumb. He leaned down, his lips close to her ear, and whispered, "It's almost over, Jen, just hang on a little bit longer."

She offered him a watery smile as more tears fell. "No, Jack," she said in a voice so faint he had to strain to hear. "It's not almost over. It's just beginning."

Moments later, something heavy constricted her chest, squeezing her lungs free of air. Jen fought panic. The doctor beyond the sheet was speaking to her, telling her everything was fine, the baby was almost out … the room swam into a nighmarish blur of color and light and motion. Seasickness. She flashed on an old memory, huddled wet and terrified in the shelter of Pacey's boat cabin in a terrible storm that could have killed them both, but didn't … "I have a regret. I regret that I've never been in love…"

"No," she said, but her protest was lost in the din of activity. Jack's face floated above her, ethereal, disembodied, heedless of her struggle to catch her breath.

"It's okay if you're feeling pressure, Jennifer," an unfamiliar, echoing voice said. "Just breathe through it; we're almost there."

Easy for you to say, lady; you're not the one who's suffocating, her mind snapped, regaining a bit of fire in spite of her private struggle that continued to go unnoticed. It seemed neverending, until…

"Miss Lindley, we have a beautiful little girl here."

The voice, still faraway and hollow, reached her ears, and suddenly Jen was able to take a shallow breath. She lifted her head up, straining in spite of the sheet in front of her to catch a glimpse of her daughter. "A girl?" she repeated breathlessly, looking over at Jack for confirmation.

He was beaming, his eyes glistening as he gazed raptly at something outside Jen's line of vision. "Oh, Jen," he said, laughing shakily as he wiped his eyes with his hand. "Jen, she's gorgeous."

A piercing cry sliced through the room, warbling slightly at first, then clearing as someone suctioned the baby's mouth.

"I want to see her. Can I see her?" Jen asked, oblivious to the tears that were coursing down her cheeks and to her sudden, inexplicable ability to breathe easily. "Is—is she okay?"

"She's just fine," a nurse said, approaching with a wrapped bundle in her arms. She handed the baby to Jack, whose expression of awe intensified until it was almost comical. "Here you go, Daddy. Show this little beauty to her Mommy," the nurse said, smiling. Neither Jen nor Jack felt any urge or need to correct her assumption. For some reason, it didn't seem wrong.

Jack shifted the baby in his arms as if he were handling an infinitely delicate explosive, and managed the maneuver well enough for Jen to get a good look at her. And for Jen, time stopped as she laid eyes upon this precious gift created from something that fell short of love. The how stopped mattering in that instant, if it ever really had. The existence of this child was quite enough to fill in the holes David and everyone else in her life who'd ever hurt her had left. Jen saw herself in the baby's half-closed, bewildered blue eyes and knew that no matter what road she had taken to get here, this was the culmination of everything she had been through.

"I have a regret. I regret that I've never been in love…" In an instant, this statement from the past no longer held true.

"Oh yeah," she said. "This is real."