You learn that showing fear makes it worse, that crying makes them uncomfortable and being uncomfortable makes them want you gone, that the child who takes up the least room stays the longest.

So you go still.

You make your face a closed door.

You feel the terror in your body and you do not let one flicker of it reach your face, and you wait, because waiting is the only power a child in the system has — the grim endurance of outlasting a moment you cannot change.

I had been perfecting that stillness since I was small, and I had never once imagined it would serve me in a divorce court at twenty-eight, eight months pregnant, being handed back to the nothing I came from.

But it did.