“I need you to listen to me very carefully, and you cannot scream,” the woman at my kitchen table whispered, her voice barely carrying over the sound of my three-year-old daughter laughing in the backyard.

She was an older woman, maybe in her late sixties, with gray hair pulled back in a tight bun.

She was wearing a faded rain jacket that smelled of wet wool and cedar.

I didn’t know her name yet. I didn’t know why she had driven all the way out to our small house on a rainy Tuesday afternoon. All I knew was that she was shaking.

She sat at my small pine kitchen table, her hands trembling around the mug of tea I had made her out of simple politeness. She kept looking out the window.

Outside, my three-year-old daughter, Maya, was running around the yard in her yellow rain boots. She was splashing in the puddles near my tomato plants.

Maya had a laugh that could fill an entire house. She was my whole world. My husband had left us when Maya was just a baby, saying he wasn’t cut out for the constant stress of parenting.

I didn’t care. I had gone back to my job as a receptionist at a local dental clinic, sorting paper charts and fighting with insurance companies, just to keep us afloat.

We didn’t have much. I drove an old Buick with rust on the driver’s side door, clipped coupons every Sunday, and rarely bought anything new. But we were happy.

On the back of the kitchen high chair sat a yellow knitted blanket with a crooked blue border. I had made that blanket myself while I was pregnant, sitting in a cheap rocking chair in the dark.

There was a mistake in the stitching in the top-right corner where I had dropped a stitch. I kept it because it felt real. It felt like us.

“My name is Evelyn,” the woman said, finally looking at me. “I was a pediatric nurse at Memorial Hospital for thirty-four years. I was there the night your daughter was born.”

I smiled a little, though my chest felt suddenly tight. “Oh. Well, that was a crazy night. She was born at 2:47 AM. Seven pounds, four ounces.”

“I know,” Evelyn said. Her voice was flat, empty of any warmth. “I remember the exact time. I also remember the other baby born two minutes later.”

She reached into her vinyl purse and pulled out a small, clear plastic ziplock bag. Inside were two faded plastic hospital wristbands.

I stared at them. One of them had my name, Clara Vance, printed in faded blue ink. The other had a name I didn’t recognize: Brenda Sterling.