I was made of cover the baby. Everything I did in the days that followed — the police, the leaving, the standing up at last — all of it was slower and more deliberate and, in its way, harder.

But it all came from the thing my body already knew on that floor, in the dark, with my ears ringing: that I would put myself between my daughter and harm every time, without hesitation, for as long as I lived.

Brenda had meant to teach me my place.

She taught me, instead, exactly what I was willing to do.

It turned out to be more than she had ever imagined.

Chapter 2 — Cover the Baby

I could not tell, in those first seconds on the floor, whether Rosie was hurt, and it is the worst not-knowing I have ever felt.

She was crying — but was it the ordinary crying of a jarred, frightened infant, or was it something worse?

I ran my shaking hands over her, her head, her tiny limbs, murmuring to her, trying through my own panic to read her small body, and she screamed and screamed, red-faced and furious and alive, and I clung to the aliveness of that sound even as I could not be sure what it meant.

My husband, Brian, came stumbling out of the master bedroom, his eyes wide with sleep.

“What happened?” he said, looking between his mother standing over us and his wife on the floor.

“Call 911,” I said.

“Now.” And Brenda, without a flicker, said, “She tripped.

She nearly dropped the baby.” I looked up at her from the floor, my cheek still burning with the shape of her hand.