Her mother — Tessa, twenty-two years old, according to the intake — had delivered her and then, sometime in the small hours of that first night, walked out of the hospital into the Omaha winter and not come back.

No emergency contact. No blanket left behind, no note, nothing but a name and a toxicology report that told us everything we needed to know about the fight ahead.

Baby Girl Reed was in severe withdrawal.

The medical term is Neonatal Abstinence Syndrome, and it is exactly as terrible as it sounds.

A baby whose mother used drugs through a pregnancy is born dependent, and then the supply stops, and a body that weighs two pounds has to go through withdrawal from a cocktail of narcotics with a nervous system that is not even finished being built.

It is not the baby’s fault.