You are safe now.

I promise you that.” I believed her.

It was the first time in my life I had believed those words from anyone.

There should be more to tell about that day, and there is not, and the absence is the whole point.

In the version of my life Dexter had planned, this was the moment everything went wrong — the collapse, the panic, the corrupt doctor waiting, the fatal complication he had paid for.

In the life my mother had already built around me, it was simply a frightened woman going into early labor and being carried, at once, into the best care money could arrange, surrounded by people whose only purpose was to keep her and her child alive.