Val looks about as awful as a pretty woman can look—or like a woman who just gave birth to twins, and lost one. Her hair is oily, unwashed. Her lovely face is marked with bruises and red blotches, patches of acne, and lots of smudged, caked-on makeup. She is shaking: her arms, her legs, her shoulders. As soon as she sees me enter, she bursts out crying.

I put my arms around her shoulders, and during the thirty or forty seconds that I am holding Val I cannot help but consider the dramatic differences between her and Greta Moss.

Each woman is beautiful, but Greta is tall and hyper-styled. Val is small and sexy and, well, hot. Val has been totally screwed by life—the worst of luck in where she grew up, in her finances, in her future. Greta? Well, her fairy tale is told all over the internet every day.

Finally Val is calm enough to speak. “Lucy, they took my baby!” she yells.

Oh, Christ. I think that yet another baby has been stolen. But I’m understandably being an alarmist. Val quickly clarifies.

“No. She wasn’t stolen, if that’s what you’re thinking. I was supposed to be discharged from the hospital with my baby last night. And that’s when they told me. A doctor or a midwife or a nurse or somebody told me that my baby girl and I are all set and ready to leave. Then a nurse comes in, and she is all efficient and mean, and she says that the doctor or whoever is wrong. I cannot have my baby. ‘Yes,’ I say. And then they said, ‘No, that is not possible. You yourself can get out of here, but the baby must stay.’”

She brings her hands to the sides of her head. She stops talking, and she cries loudly. I have a good idea of what happened: Maternity Discharge looked at her records and saw that her blood contained a mixture of cocaine, as well as oxycodone and hydrocodone, both powerful opioids. The discharge desk or Nurse Franklin called Social Services, and they put a stop on allowing Val to leave with her daughter.

Val begins to compose herself. She starts talking again. Between sobs and shakes and coughs she explains some more. “They bring a nurse and a social worker and a cop, like I’m a criminal, to see me in the discharge office, and they say what the social worker already told me. I cannot have my baby. They will keep her like an orphan.”

I try to explain to Val that her little girl will not be kept “like an orphan.” Instead the infant will stay in the GUH neonatal nursery until the great jumble of the New York City Department of Social Services sorts things out. I tell her that she can visit the baby anytime she wants.