“You’re lucky Father Thomas is saving your baby from the fate of the orphanage.”

“Can you imagine the stigma of a fallen nun as a mother hanging over the poor child? Can you imagine the terrible shame?”

The pain gouged a chasm between me and the baby as the minutes stretched into hours, each contraction bringing it closer to the world but taking it farther from me. When the baby was finally born, I was left so weak that it felt as though it had drained all the life out of me.

“It’s a boy,” I was told.

“Praise the Lord. Less likely that he will have his mother’s weak character.”

“Yes, indeed. He will be raised by true women of God and instilled with Father Thomas’s moral fiber.”

“Please,” I whispered. “Please can I hold him?”

“I think not.”

“Please. Just for a moment. To say goodbye.”

“Give her the child.” It was the Reverend Mother, who’d come to check on my progress.

She was a kind woman, a true Christian, and I was grateful for her timely intervention. I don’t remember if I thanked her for her mercy. All I remember was my son’s face as he was reluctantly handed across to me. It was contracted into a rictus of disapproval, as though he too found our predicament distasteful.

“Forgive me, my son. Forgive me for what I am about to do,” I whispered into the tiny helix of his ear as I stroked his silky hair. I was crying freely by then, my tears spilling over onto his perfect face.

“Would you like to name him?” the Reverend Mother asked. “Before you have to leave?”

I nodded, grateful that abandonment wasn’t the only legacy I’d be leaving my son with. “I’d like to call him Daniel.”

“‘God is my judge.’ It’s a good name.”

I chose it exactly for its meaning. Having been judged harshly by both myself and the church, I never wanted Daniel to be accountable to anyone but God.

The Reverend Mother held out her arms for him. “It’s time, my dear.”

My grip around Daniel tightened. “Just a moment more, please.”

I leaned down to kiss him on his forehead, anointing him not with oil, but with a mother’s love that I hoped would protect him from the worst that life might throw at him. Of course, it hadn’t, but then I’d been thinking of sadness and despair, not bullets fired from close range.