I sat on a concrete step in a stairwell with sixty-one pages on my knees and I understood two things at once.

The first was that somebody had lied to a hospital about my child, in a way that was written down and dated and could not be walked back.

The second was that Doreen Fitts had known exactly what she was handing me at 2:19 that morning, and had been careful enough not to say one word of it out loud on a telephone to a man she had never met.