The first time she tried to talk, to pull a word  — any word — through the broken pathways of her brain, no word came.

Gabrielle Giffords began sobbing, hyperventilating, waving her good hand next to her mouth, eyes wide with fear.

Her nurse shouted for Giffords’ husband. He found his wife in her hospital bathroom.

“She had just figured out that she was trapped . . . trapped inside herself,” Mark Kelly writes in “Gabby: A Story of Courage and Hope.”

After 10 months spent following Giffords’ recovery, my twin stories on the cover of USA Today and The Arizona Republic share the raw, painful details of her journey.

In an excusive interview with Kelly, and in 32 minutes of home videos of her recovery Kelly shared with me, we see Giffords find her voice again.

Kelly told me the couple was trying for a baby when Giffords was shot Jan. 8 — a longtime dream. And they’re still hoping — they might have a baby in the next year, he said.

Read the story here, and listen to Giffords read an excerpt from the book’s final chapter — 189 words she wrote herself — right here. Her voice is different, but it’s still her own.