The cold that morning did not feel like weather.

It felt personal.

Before sunrise, Manhattan looked carved out of ice, and every gust that moved between the towers seemed determined to find exposed skin.

Cassidy Moore had been working since midnight, cleaning an office building where nobody knew her name and nobody would have cared if they had.

She wore thin rubber gloves, a discount winter coat over her uniform, and the steady, exhausted expression of a woman who had learned there was no reward for looking tired in front of people who depended on your labor.

She was on her knees in a restroom on the twelfth floor when her phone buzzed in her pocket.

The sound was small, but it went through her like a shock.

She looked at the clock.

Five in the morning.

Her chest tightened before she even pulled the phone out.

The daycare.

The teacher on the other end sounded polite in the way people do when they have already decided there is nothing more they can do.

Emma had a fever.

She had been coughing for hours.

The daycare could not keep a sick baby.

Cassidy needed to pick her up immediately.

The call ended, and for one second Cassidy just stared at the black screen in her hand.

Then she was moving.

She left the brush in the sink.

She did not clock out.

She did not explain to anyone.

She ran all the way to the elevator, down through the lobby, and into the dark blue freeze of the street.

Snow hit her face sideways.

Her shoes slipped on the slick pavement.

She kept running because a taxi was impossible and because mothers do not stop to calculate pain when their babies are sick.

At the daycare, Emma was hot enough to frighten her.

The baby’s cheeks were bright red, her eyes wet and glassy, her breath uneven.

When Cassidy took her into her arms, Emma made a weak little sound and buried her face against her mother’s chest.

Cassidy kissed the top of her head and whispered that everything was all right, even while panic spread through her body like spilled ink.

Everything was not all right.

Back in the room she rented in Brooklyn, the walls sweated damp, the window had been patched with tape and cardboard, and the heater still sat broken in the corner like a cruel joke.

Cassidy laid Emma on the bed and opened the medicine cabinet with one last thread of hope.

Empty.

She had used the final dose of fever medicine the week before.

The tiny paycheck she had stretched and divided and begged to last had not stretched far enough.

Then her phone rang again.

Her manager did not ask about Emma.

He did not ask if Cassidy needed help.

He shouted before she could speak.

There was a special assignment that morning at a private mansion on the Upper East Side.

Important client.

High standards.

If Cassidy failed to show up, she was fired.

She tried to explain that her daughter was ill, that she had no one to leave the baby with, that she needed one day.

He cut her off.

Everyone had problems, he said.

He did not pay people to bring him excuses.

When the line went dead,