There was no shock in her, no shame, no flicker of the outrage a decent woman feels on behalf of another.

There was only management.

She had come to smooth me down, to frame the erasure of my daughter as a sensible modern accommodation, to make sure I would be, in her word, sensible.

And I understood, sipping that terrible broth, that the cruelty in the delivery room had not been one man’s aberration.

It was a family position.

It was the water they swam in.

The Pembrokes had decided, somewhere up the line, that a woman was a vessel for producing heirs and a daughter was a rounding error, and they had all quietly agreed to it, and Roderick had merely been the one crude enough to say the policy out loud with the monitors still beeping.