“When was this drafted?”

“During your seventh month.”

I went cold in a way that had nothing to do with the room.

My seventh month was the forty-eight hours I had spent alone in a hospital, terrified I was losing the baby, while Ivan was, he said, stuck in Chicago closing a contract that could not wait.

I had lain awake in the dark of that ward begging a body I couldn’t control to hold on to our son.

And in those same days, three states away, my husband and his mother had been sitting with an estate lawyer, building the cage.