It did not occur to me, even after everything, that a grandmother could walk into an emergency room in the middle of the night and not even look at her sick grandchild, because such a thing was outside the range of what I believed people who loved a baby were capable of.

My relief was the last flicker of a certain innocence about my husband’s family, a belief that whatever their faults, love was in there somewhere, love would surface when a baby was in danger.

It took Brenda about four seconds, once those doors opened, to teach me otherwise.

Chapter 9 — Come On, Liam

Brenda walked straight past me.

She did not glance down at Hazel in my arms, did not slow, did not so much as look at the sick baby she had supposedly driven across the city to see.

She walked past both of us as though we were a pair of chairs, and she reached for the jacket lying on the plastic seat beside me, Liam’s jacket, and she picked it up and pushed it firmly into her son’s hands.