And sitting in that emergency room at two in the morning, with my hoarse and burning daughter against my chest and my husband studying the floor tiles, I ran out of them.

There was no more room left in me for a single further excuse.

Chapter 13 — He Didn’t Sign Up for This Much Stress

“He didn’t sign up for this much stress!” Brenda snapped, and her voice rose loud enough that it carried across the waiting room, and worse, she said it while pointing, pointing one finger down at Hazel, at my sick baby, as though my daughter were the stress in question, the problem, the thing her son had not agreed to.

Several people in the nearby chairs turned their heads to look at us, and I felt my face go hot with the shame of being made a scene of, of having my family’s ugliness put on display in a room full of strangers at two in the morning.