Page 97 of Cashmere Ruin

It’s a bombshell, one that I don’t even know where to begin to unpack. A part of me suspects that that’s the point—to get my rawest, most honest reaction—but I still find myself getting angry. “Of course not! I could never… Oh.”

“That’s right. ‘Oh.’”

Damn. She wasn’t lying about being good, was she? “So, um. Postpartum. That’s what I have?”

“I think it played a part—but honestly? I don’t think it’s the heart of it.”

“How could it not be?” I ask. “I was fine before, and now, I…”

Butwereyou?asks the little voice inside me.Were you fine?

Dr. Knox seems to be thinking the same. “Let’s go a different way,” she suggests. “Let’s focus on last night for now.”

That’s when I realize something else. “People with postpartum, they hurt their babies, don’t they? Or at least try to? So am I…?”

Am I a danger to my daughter?

For a second, Dr. Knox seems to be deep in thought. Then, without preambles, she asks, “When you climbed over that railing, did you take your baby with you?”

“No!” I yelp. “I—I’d never—” I stop dead in my tracks. “Never” doesn’t apply here. After all, didn’t I do something I thought I’dnever do just last night? However hurtful, the question is fair. “No,” I settle on, quieter. “No, I didn’t.”

“Did you think about taking your baby with you?”

I shake my head again. “No. I wasn’t thinking of her at all. Not like that, at least. Just that… she’d be better off without me.”

She gives me a warm, understanding smile. “Then you’re not a danger to your baby.”

I let out a breath I didn’t know I’d been holding. “I’m not?”

“You’re not.”

“But then… how can I have postpartum?”

“Well, let’s see.” She starts flipping through her notes. “You said you felt alienated from her. ‘Like you couldn’t relate to her at all.’ Is that correct?”

“… Yes.”

“That’s textbook postpartum depression for you.”

“But why didn’t I have it before?” I ask. “The first couple of months, I—I was fine.”

Again, that voice:Were you, though?

This time, Dr. Knox takes a little longer to answer. “Sometimes, when we’re in fast-paced situations, our mind takes a backseat. Instinct takes over. The more stressed we are, the more it holds us up, like a sort of survival mode. Think of a marionette on strings. Back at the motel, you didn’t really have time to stop, did you?”

“I guess…?”

“Think of it like this: these past few years, what day of the week did you most often get sick?”

I don’t even have to think about it. “Saturday. The weekend.”

“Right, the weekend. Because that’s when you could finally catch a break. So when you came back to the penthouse…”

“I wasn’t in survival mode anymore,” I fill in, stunned. “That’s why it hit now? Because it couldn’t hit before?”

“In part, yes,” Dr. Knox says. “But I think your postpartum’s the least of it. If it had been a severe case, survival mode wouldn’t have mattered. You’d have gotten sick, period. Instead, you went through a depressive episode two months after giving birth, with only marginal symptoms of postpartum. They contributed, but they weren’t the cause.”

“So…?”

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