Some part of me, the part that had built empires before it ever built a nursery, woke up in that delivery room and started, quietly, to work.

I think Camden mistook the calm on my face for shock, or for the merciful blankness of a woman too overwhelmed to react.

It was neither.

It was the particular silence of a strategist who has just been handed, by a careless opponent, the exact piece of information that ends the game — and who has decided, in the same instant, to say absolutely nothing, and let him keep believing he has won.

A thin, furious cry split the air.