He did not understand that, structurally speaking, he had always been living in mine.

Chapter 4 — Three Things

I reached for the phone on the bedside table with a steady hand and called my oldest friend, Priya Rhodes, a senior corporate litigator down in Atlanta.

People are often struck by that detail when I tell the story — the steadiness of the hand.

A woman minutes out of a traumatic birth, freshly abandoned, her newborn on her chest, calmly dialing a lawyer.

They expect the hand to shake.