It was a small thing, a single sentence and a raised hand.

But Martha watched it land in her daughter, and she understood it was not small at all.

For the first time in the whole ordeal, someone had handed Irene complete authority over the space around her own body — had said, out loud, in front of the father who had spent five weeks overriding her, that her no would be the one that counted.

Irene wiped her face with her sleeve and shook her head, and would not look at him, and Martha did not make her.