And the phone records told the last of it: seventeen separate incoming calls from Rosalind to my office in the weeks right after she learned she was pregnant, seventeen times she had reached for me, every single one of them blocked or turned aside before it ever reached my desk, on my mother’s standing orders.

Seventeen calls.

I have thought about that number more than almost any other.

Seventeen times a frightened pregnant woman had picked up a phone and dialed the father of her children, and seventeen times a wall she could not see had turned her away, until she stopped calling and concluded, reasonably, that the silence on the other end was my answer.

Armed with the records, Rosalind filed formal criminal complaints for document forgery and for harassment.

I voluntarily turned over every relevant corporate archive to the authorities — my own company’s records, used against my own mother, which is a thing I never imagined I would do and did not hesitate over for a moment.