By the third, the wound had begun to smell, and I knew that particular smell far better than I ever wanted to — the sweetish rot of tissue that has begun to die and turn.

I looked at my one remaining clean bandage.

I looked at the bottle with its last inch of water.

And then I put my hand on my belly, where my daughter had gone very quiet and still, barely moving now, and something in me went cold and clear and absolute.

“No,” I whispered.

“Not you.

You are not going to pay for a mistake I made about a road.”

I have delivered other people’s babies in the backs of trucks and on kitchen floors and once in the stairwell of a flooded apartment building.