They had never worked.

The begging was over; I had never begun.

What came next would speak a language Julian actually understood, the only language, it turned out, that he had ever really respected: the language of consequences, structured and funded and legally binding, delivered by a woman who had remembered, at last, exactly how to speak it.

Chapter 5 — The Decision

For the first hour after the door closed behind him, I did the thing I had been doing for six months.

I tended the babies, and I cried a little, quietly, so as not to wake them, and I felt the enormous crushing weight of four days alone settle onto my shoulders.