On Sundays, standing in front of the wooden prison doors with the other mothers, waiting to walk to the orphanage, Hazel marveled at their dogged calmness, and her own. They trudged the four miles in silence, in the cold, waiting for an hour or more to be let in, then spent two hours trying desperately to make up for a long week of absence.

We should be rending our clothes, she thought. We should be howling in the streets.

The warden at the orphanage watched the mothers carefully, afraid they might grab their children and try to escape. He wasn’t wrong to be worried. Every fiber of Hazel’s being longed to snatch Ruby and flee. She spent hours, days, thinking about it. It was thrilling to imagine doing so. To imagine doing anything.

Hazel recited rhymes from Mother Goose that she remembered from childhood—stories about a boy who tumbled down a hill and cracked his skull, and London Bridge going up in flames, and a man who went to bed and bumped his head and couldn’t get up in the morning. One-year-old Ruby babbled along; the verses delighted her. But Hazel couldn’t help thinking about the heartache and calamity lurking beneath the words. A bleeding child, a bridge on fire, a man dying in his bed. When the bough breaks, the cradle will fall, / And down will come baby, / Cradle and all.

The rhymes seemed ominous to her now. They felt like warnings.

Each week, Ruby was paler and more withdrawn. No longer did she cling to Hazel when she arrived or cry piteously when she left. She had become almost indifferent, examining Hazel coolly under her eyelashes. Within several months she was treating her like a benevolent stranger. She allowed Hazel to play pat-a-cake with her, but seemed to barely tolerate it, like a cat struggling against an embrace it didn’t invite.

One Sunday, Ruby’s upper arms were bruised; another week red strips were visible across the backs of her legs. “Did someone hurt you?” Hazel asked, searching her eyes. Ruby pulled away, discomfited by Hazel’s intensity and too young to understand what she was asking. When Hazel complained to the warden, he tilted her chin and said, “No marks appear on children who don’t deserve them.”

Hazel’s heart was a wound that wouldn’t heal.

What was happening to Ruby that she didn’t know about?

Everything.

Olive was standing just inside the main gate at the Cascades, waiting for her, when Hazel returned from the governor’s house one evening. Hazel hadn’t seen her in a while. She’d been sentenced to three weeks in the crime yard for profanity and insubordination—no surprise.

Lifting her chin toward a group of women across the courtyard, Olive said, “Ye need to be careful. Some think you’re getting special treatment. First the surgeon’s quarters on the ship, then the nursery. Now the governor’s house.”

Hazel nodded. She knew Olive was right. Other convicts had it much worse. Their employers drank, worked them to the bone, beat them. How many women were pregnant now with babies they didn’t ask for? She’d seen women do almost anything to avoid their assignments, including sucking on copper pipe to turn their tongues blue and upset their stomachs so they’d be too sick to work.