I glanced at the window, but at some point I’d closed our wooden shutters without thinking. It was a habit left over from childhood, when my mom was constantly afraid that someone would see it was only her and me inside, small and vulnerable. Trey was a sunshine person, though. It shocked me to think that only two days ago I’d been laughing with him about how our marriage was a long series of laps around the house, undoing each other’s window settings. Robert had been sleeping sweetly in my arms. Two days, but it felt a thousand years away.

Now I stared at the shutters like a feral thing, shivering, wondering if the daughter was out there. She could be three feet away, wishing me ill on the other side of my wall. She couldn’t see me, and I couldn’t see her. This was good. The old woman had looked right in the camera, showing me her face, but as a mother she’d feel protective toward her child. If I could identify the daughter, it might make it feel riskier for her to give Robert back.

Then I realized I might already have seen the daughter. She could have been the driver with the toddler who’d watched me scream and pound my steering wheel. Or driving the big SUV that had blocked the turn into my neighborhood. She could be anyone.

“I can follow rules,” I said. “I want this to be over.”

She sighed. “Mrs. Cabbat, that’s what I want, too. For this to be over.” She sounded almost sorry, which was so strange and foreign. I hated her with a black instinctual fear, huge and inadvertent, but I was also glad she had a child herself. Glad her child was female, too. It felt safer somehow. For Robert.

“How do I know he’s okay now?”

A pause, and then I heard her say, “Hey, baby? Hey there.” Her voice was gentle, almost sweet, and I heard his sleepy protest. I knew him from that sound, even under her voice and the noise of traffic. It was Robert. I felt relief, then horror. It was as if I’d had a knife in me this whole time, and she had pulled it out, then put it right back in.

“You have to burp him twice,” I blurted, my calm shell cracking. I had a vision of him colicky, crying, keeping her awake. I didn’t want her angry or resenting him. “At least twice, because otherwise he gets fussy.”

There was an awkward pause, and then she said, “Mine was that way, too. When she was small.” Her voice was gruff, but I felt a surge of hope. This tiny bit of information, one parent to another, felt like a filament stretched between us, tenuous as spiderweb, connecting us. “Say the rules back to me. I need to make sure you understand.”