Maria Cahill was alone at home when she realized that something was very wrong.
Her children were sleeping in the next room. David Henrie, her husband, was flying on a plane, unreachable, while a bacterial infection resulting from severe food poisoning spread through her body. It was November 2023, and Maria was in her second trimester of pregnancy. That night, she lost her daughter Isabel.
Maria later described that moment as the most traumatic of her life. She called the three years that followed, in her own words, an “absolute nightmare”: the grief, the fear, the shadow of what happened hovering over every new attempt to start a family. Her children, still little, began praying every night for the baby on the way, with a phrase that sums up the terror they inherited: that Peter would not die.
Peter Henrie was finally born on September 2, weighing 10 pounds 4 ounces, one week after his due date. Maria wrote the announcement herself from David’s phone, determined to show what is almost never said about a rainbow baby: the loss that gives the term its name. “We are immensely grateful that he is here”, she wrote.
