“You’re relieved of your position,” Quandt said flatly.

“Only my chief can do that,” Hugh said. “And I’m in too deep now with the hostage taker to walk away. I’m sorry. I know the rules. I know it’s a conflict of interest. But my God, Captain—nobody has greater incentive for this to end well than I do. You understand that, don’t you?”

“I understand that when you lied to me, to the chief, to everyone—you knew exactly what you were doing.”

“No. If I knew what I was doing, she’d be here with me.” Hugh cleared his throat and forced himself to look the commander in the eye. “Don’t make my daughter pay for my stupidity. Please,” he begged. “It’s my kid.”

He was underwater again, and flailing in the weeds. He was drowning.

Quandt stared him down. “Everyone in there,” he said, “is somebody’s kid.”

—

BEX STARED AT THE FLUORESCENT lights overhead in the hospital’s operating room, wondering if she was going to die.

She was worried. Not for herself, but for Wren, for the rest of the people in the clinic. And of course for Hugh, who shouldered this burden. He would blame himself for anything that went wrong today. Some men wear responsibility and some are worn by it; Hugh had always been the former. Even at her father’s funeral, when Hugh had been just eight, he insisted on shaking the hand of everyone who came to grieve. He was the last to leave the grave site, walking back to the parking lot with the minister. Bex had settled her sobbing mother in the car and gone back to get Hugh. “I’m the man of the house now,” he’d told her, and so she had spent the rest of her life walking behind him, trying to inconspicuously take away some of the load he carried.

It was why she had moved back home, when her mother’s grief made her turn to a bottle and neglect Hugh.

It was why she made sure that there was a female presence in Wren’s life after Annabelle was gone.

It was why she had brought Wren to the clinic.

The anesthesiologist leaned over her. “You might feel a little burning,” he said, “but then you’re going to have the best nap of your life.”

When Hugh was little, he had never wanted to go to sleep at night. She used to have to create two alternatives that gave him a choice and the sense he was in control: Do you want to walk upstairs to your room, or do you want me to carry you? Do you want to brush your teeth first, or wash your face? Either scenario ended in bedtime. But then he began to get wiser. He would ask her to read three books, and she would counter with one, and he would laugh and tell her he’d been hoping for two all along.

Even at five, he had been a negotiator.

When the anesthesia took effect, Bex was smiling.

—

JANINE COULD FEEL THE GHOSTS. They were sitting in her lap and in her arms and pulling at the hem of her dress. This building was full of babies without mothers.

She had come to get information. Intelligence. Something that could be revealed online, the way Lila Rose had done, to expose the reality of these murder centers. She was never supposed to get stuck here.

Janine had grown up on the southwest side of Chicago, where you came not from neighborhoods, but from parishes. She was from St. Christina, and she knew from the time she was a young child that a baby was a baby the moment it was conceived. At the very least, it was a human person in progress.

She was not unrealistic. She understood that abstinence wasn’t always possible, that birth control sometimes failed, but if a couple decided to engage in an activity that could potentially create a life, they should also be prepared to accept a change in their own lives. She knew, of course, that it wasn’t just a woman who was responsible for a pregnancy—although it was the woman who had to carry the baby for nine months. But nine months was a hiccup in the time line of a woman’s life. And it wasn’t the child’s fault that led to him or her being conceived. So why should he have to pay with his life?

Janine had been told she was anti-woman. That she was ridiculous. That if she didn’t want an abortion, she didn’t have to have one. But she knew that if a woman killed that same bundle of cells a few months later, there wouldn’t even be an argument. She would be vilified and put in jail for life. The only difference was the calendar.

Janine had been twelve when her mother conceived again, an accident, at age forty-three. She remembered how her parents had come home from an appointment with two new bits of knowledge: the baby was a boy, and he had one extra chromosome. The doctor had counseled her mother to terminate the pregnancy, because the baby’s life would be full of developmental and health challenges.

She’d been old enough to pick up on her parents’ fear. She had Googled Down syndrome. Half the kids who were born with Down syndrome also needed heart surgery. They had increased chances of developing leukemia and thyroid problems. By age forty, many had early Alzheimer’s. And then there were other complications: ear infections, hearing loss, skin problems, bad vision, seizures, gastrointestinal disorders.

She believed she knew everything about her baby brother before he arrived. But she didn’t know that Ben would have a belly laugh that made her start laughing, too. Or that he would be ticklish on his right foot but not his left. She didn’t know that he wouldn’t go to sleep unless Janine read him exactly three books. She knew that he would meet milestones later than other kids, that he might need help. But she didn’t know how much she would need him.

It wasn’t all rosy. There were blogs where parents talked about having kids with Up syndrome, and how they’d been given an extra blessing from God in the form of that additional chromosome. That was bullshit. It took Ben three years to be potty trained. He whined when he was tired, like any other little brother. He was bullied in school. One year, Ben had a surgery on Janine’s birthday, and her parents completely forgot to give her a cake, a party, a moment of attention.

At college, when she was president of the Students for Life club, she had plenty of conversations about the moral quicksand of abortion, and she used her brother as an example. Ben may not have been the child her parents had expected, but he was the one they got. Having a child is a terrible risk, no matter what. You might have a healthy baby who then gets a heart condition, diabetes, addicted to opioids. You might raise a kid who gets her heart broken, who miscarries her own baby, whose husband dies fighting overseas. If we are meant to only have children who never encounter difficulty in life, then no one should be born.

Had Janine’s mother done what the doctor suggested at that prenatal appointment, Ben would never have existed. She wouldn’t have seen the triumph on his face when he finally learned how to tie his own shoes, when he brought home his first friend from school. He wouldn’t have been there on the day her dog Galahad was hit by a truck, the day everything went wrong, when no one could make her stop crying and Ben just crawled into her arms and hugged her.

Now, Janine glanced at Joy, who was curled sideways in her chair, her face buried in her hands. She wished she had been standing at the fence today when Joy came into the clinic to have her abortion. She might have kept her from making the decision she had.

It was too late for Joy’s baby. But that didn’t mean it was too late for Joy.

Janine sat up a little straighter. Even Norma McCorvey changed her mind. She had been Jane Roe in Roe v. Wade. In the 1970s, when she was twenty-two, she found herself pregnant for the third time. She lived in Texas, where abortion was illegal unless the mother’s life was at risk. Her lawsuit went all the way to the Supreme Court, and of course, you know how that turned out. She became an abortion advocate, until the nineties, when she did an abrupt one-eighty. From that moment, all the way till she died in 2017, she asked the Supreme Court to overturn their decision on her case.

What led to her change of opinion? She was born again.

Janine smiled to herself.

Born again.

She didn’t think it was any coincidence that the term for letting God back into your heart had, at its core, birth.

—

IZZY SAT ON THE FLOOR beside the body of Olive Lemay. Her hands were still shaking with the effort of trying to resuscitate the woman, but she had known that there wasn’t a prayer. The gun had gone off at close range. The bullet had torn through the older woman’s heart. Even as Izzy had tried to stanch the flow of blood, she had felt Olive’s hand come up to cover hers. She had seen the fear in the woman’s eyes.

“That was a very brave thing you did,” Izzy whispered fiercely.

Olive shook her head. Her eyes held Izzy’s.

Sometimes, being a nurse doesn’t matter. Being human does.