Louie shook his head. “I never wanted to make anyone else a target,” he admitted. “And eligible ladies don’t often celebrate the fact that I spent the day looking into other women’s vaginas.”

Behind him, Janine shifted. “You don’t have to have a personal stake to know that it’s wrong to kill an innocent baby.”

Eighty-eight percent of abortions happened in the first twelve weeks of pregnancy, Louie knew, but the antis acted like those fetuses were already eight pounds and holding their own bottles.

Joy’s eyes widened. “You are not defending him,” she said to Janine. “After he knocked you out?”

“I’m just saying—if it wasn’t wrong, then there wouldn’t be psychos like him.”

Izzy stared at her. “That’s the most ass-backward logic I’ve ever heard.”

“Is it? You want to protect children with laws that punish rapists and molesters and murderers. Why is this any different?”

“Because they’re not children yet,” Izzy said. “They’re embryos.”

“They may not be born but they’re still human.”

“Oh my God,” Joy said. “Shut her up before I do it myself.”

Janine folded her arms. “I’m sorry. I know that he’s insane, but you can’t tell me there is ever a valid reason to destroy a child.”

Louie looked at her. “She’s right,” he murmured, and the others all stared at him. “There is never a valid reason to destroy a child.”

He thought of what he had seen over the years: The Syrian teen who needed to terminate after being raped as an act of war, but who couldn’t get consent from her parents, who had been killed in the same war. The sixteen-year-old who had wanted to have an abortion at eight weeks, whose parents stood in her way with their religion, and so her abortion was delayed for six weeks while she figured out how to get a judicial bypass and to raise the money to terminate. The fourteen-year-old who wanted to keep her baby, but was being pushed by her mother to have the abortion.

A few years back, a twelve-year-old girl came in who was sixteen weeks pregnant. Her hysterical mother and stoic father were with her. She was quiet to the point of disengagement, clutching a tattered stuffed rabbit. She had said that a neighborhood boy got her pregnant, but during the intake process when she was alone with the counselor, she slipped up on her lie and revealed that the baby was her father’s. The man was taken off by the police in handcuffs, but that girl, she still needed an abortion.

While Louie performed the procedure he talked to her. He told her, This is not normal, what happened to you. This is not something you’ve done. She didn’t respond. She didn’t act like a twelve-year-old. She never had been allowed to be a twelve-year-old. But he hoped that one day, when she was twice this age, she would remember the kindness of a man who hadn’t hurt her.

Now, Louie turned to Janine. “What we do here,” he said, “what I do. Sometimes it lets children be children.”

Janine opened her mouth as if to argue the point, but then snapped it shut.

Izzy tried to turn the conversation back to a safer spot. “Well, whoever she is—wife or daughter—maybe she can convince him to let us go.”

From the couch further away came the voice of the girl, Wren, who could not have been much older than the child Louie had been remembering. Had she come here to get an abortion? Would they, in other circumstances, have met on the exam table?

“If he was my father,” she muttered, “I sure as hell wouldn’t talk to him.”

—

FOR A MOMENT, THE ONLY sound in the hospital room was the intravenous pump. Beth lay on her side, her face turned away from her public defender. “I wrapped it up,” Beth whispered. “I put it in the garbage. I didn’t know what else to do.”

She had bought misoprostal and mifepristone, the pills used in a medication abortion, off the Internet. That was illegal in the United States, which Beth hadn’t known at the time. Abortion clinics offered medication abortions to women who were up to ten weeks pregnant, but they had to be administered in the clinic. Beth had been sixteen weeks along, and had taken the pills at home. The medication had done its job, but it had also caused enough hemorrhaging to land her in the ER.

Tears slipped down the bridge of Beth’s nose. For the first time since she had started talking, she looked at Mandy. “Miz DuVille? It wasn’t a baby yet … was it?”

Mandy’s mouth tightened.

“When I went to the clinic,” Beth said, “there was a woman outside who said my baby could feel pain.”

The lawyer actually recoiled, and that only made Beth feel even worse. Mandy was an attorney, not a shrink. For all Beth knew, Mandy was against abortion, and was only here to do her job. Didn’t lawyers have to defend horrible people—murderers, rapists—all the time, no matter what they felt about them personally?

“I’m sorry,” Beth whispered. “I just … I haven’t had anyone to talk to.”

“It’s not true,” Mandy said flatly. “The pain thing.”

Beth came up on an elbow. “How do you know?”

“Science doesn’t support it. I’ve done the research.”

Beth frowned, confused. “But you said you didn’t even know anything about me before the arraignment.”

“I did the research,” the lawyer repeated, “for me.” She leaned forward, her head bent, propped against the heels of her hands. “I was thirteen weeks pregnant. Just at the point where you can tell people you’re having a baby, without tempting fate. My husband and I were at the ultrasound,” she said. “I wanted to name her Millicent, if she was a girl. Steve said no little Black girl is named Millicent. He wanted a boy named Obediah.”

“Obediah?” Beth repeated.

“Knock, knock,” Mandy said.

“Who’s there?”

“Obediah.”

“Obediah who?” Beth played along.

“Obediah-dore you.” Mandy closed her eyes. “Steve told me that joke, and then after that, everything went to hell. The technician came in and turned on the machine and started the ultrasound and just went white as a sheet.” She shook her head. “The doctor who came in wasn’t my usual doctor. I remember exactly what he said. This fetus has a genetic abnormality inconsistent with life.”

Beth sucked in her breath.

“It was called holoprosencephaly. It happens when two sperm fertilize one egg at the exact same moment. There was a heartbeat and a brain stem, but the forebrain had never developed. If it survived birth, it would die within a year.” Mandy looked up. “I didn’t want to terminate. I was raised Catholic.”

“What did you do?” Beth asked.

“I went online and looked up pictures of the babies who had it. It was … it was horrible.” She looked up at Beth. “I know there are mothers who have kids with profound disabilities, and who see that as a blessing. It was kind of a wake-up call to admit to myself I wasn’t one of them.”

“What about your husband?”

Mandy looked up. “He said it was a no-brainer.”

A laugh burst out of Beth; she clapped her hand over her mouth. “No he didn’t.”

“He did.” Mandy nodded, smiling faintly. “He did and we laughed. We laughed, and we laughed, until we cried.”

“Did you … do you have children now?”

Mandy met her gaze. “I stopped trying after the third miscarriage.”

Silence fell between them. Beth spun through another scenario, one in which she had been brave enough to tell her father she was pregnant, one in which she had carried the baby to term, and given it to someone like Mandy. “You must hate me,” Beth whispered.

For a long moment Mandy didn’t speak. Then she lifted her chin. “I don’t hate you,” she said carefully. “If you and I both told people our stories, even the most pro-life advocates would see mine as a tragedy. Yours is a crime.” She thought for a moment. “It’s funny. The logic goes that as a minor, you can’t exercise free will to consent, because you don’t have the mental capacity to do so. But in your case, the fetus is getting the protection you’re not, as if its rights are worth more than your own.”

Beth stared at her. “So what happens now?”

“You’re going to get discharged from the hospital, in a day or so. And then you’ll stay in custody until the trial.”

Beth’s heart monitor began to spike. “No,” she said. “I can’t go to jail.”

“You don’t have a choice.”

I never did, Beth thought.

—

“YOU’RE LYING,” GEORGE SAID. “MY daughter isn’t here.”

Fuck that cop. He might be fishing for information, but that didn’t mean George planned to give it to him. Yet now that Hugh McElroy had brought up his daughter, he couldn’t stop thinking about her.

Was Lil all right?

Was she looking for him?

“Because she doesn’t know what you’re doing,” Hugh said. “Am I right?”

Lil knew that he loved her. He loved her so much that he had come here to make things right, even though it seemed impossible. George would never meet his grandchild. He just hoped this had not cost him Lil, too.

“How would she feel about you being here, George?”

He had not been thinking about that, clearly, when he came. He was just an avenging angel for her suffering. And he had been thinking of God’s word. An eye for an eye.

A life for a life.

“What’s her name, George?”