And then Brenda delivered the rest of it.

“You’re the mother, Paige,” she said, without one trace of sympathy.

“So figure it out.”

Those words landed harder than I expected, and not for the reason you might think.

It was not that I had not been figuring it out; I had been figuring it out every single day and every single night since Hazel was born, figuring it out was the entire content of my life.

It was that Brenda had finally said out loud, in plain unmistakable words, the thing I had feared was true underneath all the little comments and the extra plates of food.