Then I looked at the hearing date notice again.
February fourteenth.
Not a date I had any particular relationship to — it had never been a significant date before this, and I was not the kind of person who assigned significance to calendar dates as a category. But the specific alignment of it — the hearing concluded, the outcome determined, and then the birth — had the quality of an answer to a question I had not known I was asking.
The thing that had been done to her — the taking, the suppression, the forty-seven years of architecture designed to prevent her existence — it would be formally accounted for, in the legal structure of the world she was arriving into, before she arrived.
She would not be born into a world where it was still unresolved.
I put my hand on my stomach. The aut
