"“THAT CHILD’S BLOOD WILL NEVER BELONG IN THIS FAMILY!”

The maximum-security correctional facility in Bedford Hills sat beneath a leaden gray December sky, surrounded by three rows of razor wire that hummed faintly in the damp wind.

I went alone.

Michael had offered to come with me, but I had told him no. This was a debt that belonged to the woman who had held my daughter over the abyss; it was a conversation that could only happen between two women who knew the exact price of a child.

I was led through three secure gates into a narrow, concrete visitation booth divided by a thick pane of scratched polycarbonate.

When the metal door on the other side clicked open, Diane Bennett walked in.

She was wearing a standard-issue green canvas jumpsuit that was three sizes too large for her thin frame. Her silver hair had not been colored in two months; dark, greasy gray roots showed through the crown, and her skin had the dull, yellowish pallor of institutional fluorescent lighting. The immaculate manicure was gone, her nails clipped short and rough.

She sat down on the steel stool, her movements slow, mechanical, like an automaton whose springs had wound down.

She picked up the black plastic receiver with a trembling, spotted hand.

I picked up mine.

"You look pleased with yourself, Emma," Diane said. Her voice was muffled through the small perforations in the plastic, but the bitterness was still there, preserved like venom in dried amber. "I hear Michael has purged the board. He fired Arthur’s cousins. He’s running the company like a dictator."

"He’s running it like his father would have," I said. "Thomas’s father."

Diane flinched at the name. It was the first time she had heard it spoken without her permission in thirty-four years.

"Why did you do it, Diane?" I asked, looking through the scratched plastic into her pale eyes. "Not the balcony. The rest of it. You lived with him for thirty-four years. You watched him take his first steps. You helped him with his college applications. Did you ever—even for one day—love him?"

Diane stared at me. Her mouth worked, the thin lips twitching as if she were trying to summon a curse, but the silence stretched between us until the only sound was the breathing of the guard stationed by the steel door.

"You don't understand that world, Emma," she whispered finally. "You grew up in an apartment where people shouted when they were angry and hugged when they were sorry. You think that's how life works."

"I know that's how humanity works," I replied.

"In my family," Diane said, her voice dropping into a rhythmic, chilling monotone, "we were taught that love was an expense account. My father hugged me twice in my life: the day I was presented at the Waldorf, and the day I signed the contract to marry Arthur Bennett. When Arthur brought that baby home from Switzerland, I didn't see a child. I saw the terms of my survival. If I let myself love him, I would have had to admit that he belonged to another woman. I would have had to admit that I was just the caretaker."

"And so you chose to be an executioner instead," I said.

Diane looked down at her rough, clipped nails.

"I couldn't let her have it," she whispered. "That little girl. She looked too much like the O'Connor family. When Michael brought her to the house for the first time, when I saw those eyes... I knew the game was over. I knew that in forty years, I had built nothing. I had only kept the seat warm for Thomas's granddaughter."

"You could have had a family, Diane," I said, my voice quiet, completely devoid of the anger that had carried me through the past two months. "If you had loved him, Michael would have protected you until the day you died. He would have paid the trustees; he would have kept the secret. You traded a son who worshiped you for an estate that didn't even belong to your father."

Diane looked up. A sudden, terrible clarity broke across her face—the realization that the prison she was sitting in was not built of concrete and razor wire, but of thirty-four years of cold, calculated pride.

"The trial starts in March," she said, her voice cracking. "Miller says they won't offer a plea. The DA wants attempted murder in the first degree."

"Michael isn't testifying against you," I said.

Diane’s head jerked up, her eyes wide with sudden, pathetic hope. "He isn't?"

"No," I replied, standing up from the steel stool, letting the black plastic receiver dangle from its armored cord. "He isn't testifying because he isn't coming to the courthouse. Neither am I. Marcus has the security footage. The two maids have signed their depositions. We don't need to be there to see you sentenced, Diane."

"Emma—wait!" she cried, pressing her flat palm against the polycarbonate glass. "Tell him... tell him I kept his baby teeth! In the jewelry box in the master dressing room—the silver box with the sapphire lid! Tell him I kept them!"

I looked at the hand against the glass—the hand that had pushed my baby into the air.