Romina drove to our house to get a toothbrush from his bathroom; he had changed the garage code and would not come to the door, so she let herself in through a window like a burglar in her own brother-in-law’s house, which is the kind of indignity that would have been funny in another life.

I swabbed the inside of my sleeping son’s cheek, as gently as I could, sealed the envelopes, and sent it all to the lab.

And then there was nothing to do but wait, which is its own particular cruelty.

My milk came in with a fever.

I slept sitting up, nursing him in the dark of my sister’s guest room while my daughters slept down the hall and asked, each morning, whether Daddy was going to visit today.

And every time I changed the baby and saw the little crescent on his back, a slow quiet rage moved through me — that something so small and so innocent, a mark he had done nothing to earn or deserve, was being used as a weapon against my character and against his own belonging.