After I gave birth, my husband threw me and our newborn out onto the street. Penniless and desperate, I tried to sell the necklace I had worn all my life. The jeweler turned pale and whispered, “Her father has been looking for her for twenty years.”

The day my husband kicked me out, I was still bleeding from giving birth.

I stood on the front steps of the terraced house we’d shared for three years, clutching my two-day-old son to my chest as the cold March wind pierced the thin hospital blanket that wrapped him. At my feet lay my half-closed nightgown, filled with formula samples, a change of clothes, and the crumpled discharge papers from St. Mary’s Medical Center. Behind the door, I could hear laughter.