My daughter was alive, and she was somewhere across the city, and she was mine, and I was going to her, and no force on earth — not money, not lawyers, not a family’s cruelty, not a husband’s threats — was ever going to stand between us again.

I did not run up those stairs as a wronged wife, or a scorned woman, or a victim of a betrayal.

I ran up them as a mother, which is the oldest and most dangerous thing a person can be, and the thing all of them, in their arrogance, had made the mistake of forgetting I was.

They had seen a leech, a pretender, a kept woman, a signature waiting to be collected.

They had never once seen the actual thing standing in front of them, which was a mother between whom and her living child there was now nothing left at all.

I took the stairs two at a time.