She had no idea that her little performance of condescension, delivered over my hospital bed the morning after, would be among the last comfortable moments of her family’s life.

What I could not say to Rosalind, because there would have been no point, was that she had just told me something far larger than she meant to.

She thought she was managing a delicate inheritance matter — soothing a wife who had lost out on a technicality of male succession.

But in the ease of her, in the practiced, unbothered grace with which she counseled me not to take to heart the erasure of my own newborn daughter, she had revealed the actual value her family placed on a girl, and it was zero.

Not low.