“Brenda,” I said, and I could feel the whole room tilting slightly under me, the way the world does when something impossible is happening in front of you.

“What are you doing?” She turned to me then, finally, with a stern, composed look on her face, the look of a woman who considered herself entirely in the right.

“I am helping my son,” she said.

“We are waiting,” I said, and I heard my own voice go careful and slow, “for a doctor to see Hazel.” I pointed down, at our daughter, at her flushed little face against my chest, in case somehow the fact of the sick baby had escaped everyone.

“I know that, Paige,” Brenda said, and there was no give in it at all, no flicker of concern.