She has given me permission for this part and read it twice and changed two things.

She left New York on the sixth of May and went to Charlotte, North Carolina, because a woman she had worked with in 2014 had a spare room and did not ask questions.

She was eleven weeks along.

She found out it was twins at fourteen weeks, at a clinic, alone, on a Tuesday afternoon, and she has told me that she laughed — actually laughed, out loud, in a room — because it was so far past anything she could manage that it stopped being frightening and became absurd.

She worked until she was thirty-four weeks.