“Will you — someday, when I’ve served my time — will you ever let me see her?”

Chapter 16 — Complete on Her Own

I leaned toward the glass.

“Do you remember what you said in front of the medical staff,” I asked him, “while I was in labor with her?

You said she was excluded.

You tried to erase her before she had taken a single breath of air.”

“I was out of my mind, I wasn’t — ”

“My daughter does not need a father who treated her birth as a liability to be managed,” I said, and I kept my voice quiet and even, because cruelty was not what I was there for.