Now, daughter, I’m to tell you a story to coax you into the world. When Mrs. B says it’s the darkness that binds us, I know she means nothing by it; they are words to ease my time. But the River Fleet, in the far distance out my window, demands that I look. More water, flowing across time, beyond pastoral fields and nursery gardens that remind me of the villages of my girlhood and the best part of my youth, out past the occasional brickworks that remind me of the worst. Here, at the edge of Somers Town, and the farthest reach of my vision, the river runs clear under an ancient elm with great gnarled arms. It bows its graceful canopy as if to mark the water’s progress to St. Pancras Church, where, this spring, that same old elm burst with frothy yellow buds that swayed with the wind, and bowed to us, your father and me. The day that I married—defying my own nature and betraying all I held dear.

My womb quickening with you.

It was the thirty-eighth anniversary of my birth, the day I chose, and Mr. Godwin consented, to begin this life together, this new world we’ve made for you. I didn’t tell him, but am keenly aware that every year, without knowing it, we also mark the anniversary of our death. For however untroubled the Fleet is here, in this midlife paradise, I know that by the time it joins the Thames, it will be sullied by the bloody scraps of butchers’ stalls, the bloated corpses of cats and dogs, dead flowers, and human excrement.

My own story is no prettier, far from it. There are triumphs in it, a scattering of joys, but the beautiful sits side by side with the grotesque; I cannot separate them. All the brutality is there, the hurt I’ve suffered at the hands of others, but so, too, my own mistakes, missteps, and missed understandings. I have held it close, afraid to unleash it into the world. So how could I tell you, my almost-born daughter, the story of that vivid darkness as if it would persuade you of this place? Would you survive the deepest bone-secrets of our brief shared being? You inside me. Me inside you.

No, I think not.

But then true labor comes, quick and hard.

“Perhaps it’s time to call for Mr. Godwin, when he finishes his supper,” I tell Mrs. B.