Fast, rhythmic, impossibly strong. My daughter’s heartbeat. Her vitals were steady. I fell back against the pillow and sobbed until my chest hurt.

My parents came through the doors minutes later. My father, who is not a demonstrative man, looked ready to take the building apart. My mother didn’t cry.

She listened to the whole account with her face turning to stone.

When I finished, she took out her phone. “I’m calling the police,” she said, with a calm that frightened me. “And I’m calling Priya Shah.”

Priya was a family law attorney my mother had programmed into her phone months earlier. She’d been watching the slow annexation of my life from the sidelines, waiting.

The officers arrived within the hour and stood at the foot of my bed while I gave a statement, making sure they wrote down Lorraine’s exact words: Hit her again.