The room had gone entirely still.

Because it had, in the space of one old woman’s confession, stopped being a story about a snobbish mother-in-law and a cruel party joke.

A collar was cruelty.

A collar was ugliness and contempt and could be argued about for years by people determined to call it a joke.

This was something else.

This was a deliberate arrangement, planned in advance, meant to put a five-week-old infant in the path of a fall — to manufacture, out of an engineered accident or an engineered outburst, whatever it took to build a case that the baby was not safe in her own mother’s arms.