The room went quiet when I placed the ultrasound photo on the coffee table. My husband, Aleric, looked at it, then at me, while his mother stood beside the bassinet holding the three-month-old baby he had brought into our Greenwich home only days earlier.

Rowan Carmichael.

Age: twenty-eight.

Gestational age: thirty-six weeks.

Ultrasound, fetal monitoring, blood panel.

An ultrasound image was stapled to the back.

I stared at the name.

Rowan Carmichael.

I knew her.

Five years earlier, she had attended our wedding.

She wore a champagne-colored bridesmaid dress and stood outside my bridal suite with slightly swollen, red-rimmed eyes.

When I asked who she was, she told me she was Aleric’s cousin.

They had grown up together, she said.

They were extremely close.

I believed her.

Three months after our wedding, I had