I called an ambulance.

I took off my heavy winter coat and wrapped it around Wendy, and I gathered my son against my own chest to give him what warmth I had, and when the paramedics could not get the stretcher turned in our narrow hallway I carried him downstairs myself, holding him the way you hold the only thing that matters.

At the hospital, the doctors treated Wendy for several serious conditions that had come, all of them, from being left alone, cold, and unfed after giving birth — the predictable, documented, entirely preventable consequences of the care she had been promised and denied.

I will not itemize her injuries here; they went into her medical record, where they belonged, and where they would later do a great deal of work.

Our son was mildly hypothermic, the doctors said, but stable — they had gotten to him in time, and he would be fine, and when a nurse laid him under the warming lights and his color came back and he began, furiously, to cry, I had to leave the room for a moment, because a man can only hold so much at once.

Then I came back, and I sat down in the chair beside my wife’s bed, and I watched her sleep with our now-warm, now-safe son on her chest, and I took out my phone, and I began to work.