It was defensible in a certain kind of way, it made her look cold rather than anything worse, and it got the result she needed in the smallest number of words.

The true sentence she did not say, and would not say for nineteen years, and which I now know off a bank statement, is that a child in her house would have been a child whose expenses she would have had to document.

“You’ll take him or he goes to the state,” she said.

And the room went quiet except for the clock in the hall.

I looked at Thaddeus.