The young woman was Odile. Marguerite had been her caseworker for two years. My daughter had kept a box of things for her at the office, and had been quietly paying for Odile’s antenatal care out of her own salary, and had never told me any of it.
Odile had learned about the death that morning from the clinic. She had not known who I was at the café. She recognised me afterward from a photograph on Marguerite’s desk. Every crib in that yard came from twenty-six women my daughter had worked with, brought overnight, because they had nothing else to give and wanted me to see what she had been.
I keep four of them. The rest went where they were needed.
Odile’s daughter is nine now. She is called Marguerite. She sleeps in the crib marked number one, or she did, until she outgrew it and started climbing on it instead.
I thought I had lost the only proof my daughter existed. She left it in the hands of the people she saw when nobody else did, and they carried it back to me in the dark.
