“The baby is only twenty-eight weeks. Her lungs aren’t ready.”

“If you don’t do it?” I asked, the words sticking in my throat.

“They will both die in this room within ten minutes,” he said.

My hand shook so badly I could barely grab the pen.

The clipboard seemed to weigh a hundred pounds.

I looked at Megan.

Her face was gray, her lips turning a faint, terrifying shade of blue.

The woman I loved, the woman I had promised to protect from my mother’s madness, was slipping away.

And our little girl, whom we hadn’t even named yet, was trapped inside her, running out of air.

“Sign here,” the doctor said, pointing to a yellow highlighted line at the bottom of the page.

My mother’s face flashed in my mind.

She had done this.

She had put something in the food, or the tea, or the nursery.

She had tried to steal our life, and now I had to choose how to save it.

“Jake,” the doctor urged. “We are out of time.”

I pressed the pen to the paper.