It is never the baby’s fault. But the baby is the one who pays.

Her cries were not the cries of a healthy newborn. A healthy newborn’s cry is an announcement, a demand, a big round sound from small lungs.

This was different. This was high and thin and breathless and endless, a shrill, tearing sound with no bottom to it, the sound of a nervous system that had caught fire and could not be put out.

Her tiny arms and legs jerked and thrashed against the swaddle. Her skin went mottled and tight, patched red and gray.

Her whole miniature body was rigid with a pain she had no way to understand and no way to escape.

We had done everything.