I understand then I’m looking for the baby, and under my fear is guilt, because this is my fault. I left him and he’s missing. I don’t look in Madison’s room. I never saw her dead and it’s as if my subconscious wants to protect me from imagining how it was. The hump under the pink frilly covers. The pillow with unicorns, the slow-turning dazzle of her night light. A faint smell of urine that no air freshener could mask entirely. I wonder how Abby never noticed it, or maybe she did and simply left me to deal with it.

Then, in the dream, I usually hear a noise. It comes from downstairs. A gun shot. And I start to run.

Of course, this isn’t how it happened. I didn’t hear a shot from upstairs, and Carson was never missing, he was in my arms the whole time. When the police arrived, a hard-bitten cop took him from my grasp and held him at arm’s length, as if bemused at what to do with him. Carson was grizzling by then, but only because he’d missed his nap. He had been pressed tight to me in the cupboard while I braced my body against the door and bit my fist to keep from sobbing. I remember the smell of his head, a warm innocent baby smell, hot from the sun, and his soft grunts, which I silently prayed would not turn into cries.

It was always clear to me that I was hiding to protect the baby. I wasn’t really scared that I was going to be killed too, though of course I told the court I was. But Carson, I couldn’t bear for anything to happen to him. I loved that baby, a love that had grown inside me on all those long nights sitting awake with him, soothing his tears, changing his nappies, watching his eyes widen when he saw something for the first time, the simple wonder in him, his smile. The fact that I was never allowed to see him again was a great pain to me. I had often imagined him over the years, what he might look like, if he’d inherited David’s height or Abby’s eyes. His birthday, the only one of the family I remembered, was February 17th. I thought of him every year, wishing I could send him a present, like some sad spinster aunt. I was not his aunt, of course. Just someone who’d once been his nanny, who’d gone on trial for murdering his mother and father, his five-year-old sister, who’d saved him as best I could.