At midnight, my newborn daughter was crying when my mother-in-law suddenly slapped me so hard that my baby fell to the floor and lost consciousness. She coldly told me, “Shut her up, or get out of the house.” At the hospital, the doctor said my daughter was already gone, and I called the police immediately.
At 12:17 a.m., the apartment on the south side of Chicago was already trembling with noise. Not from music, not from traffic, but from the piercing cries of a six-week-old baby who had been fighting sleep for nearly an hour. Emily Carter stood in the narrow living room, her arms aching, her hair falling loose from a rushed ponytail, rocking her daughter against her shoulder while whispering, “It’s okay, Lily. Mommy’s here. Mommy’s here.”
But Lily would not settle.
The baby’s cries cut through the dark like a siren, bouncing off the kitchen tile and the old walls of the two-bedroom unit owned by Emily’s mother-in-law, Margaret Hayes. Emily’s husband, Daniel, was away on a trucking route to Missouri, leaving Emily alone in the apartment with Margaret for the third night in a row. Margaret had never wanted Emily there. She had made that clear from the day Daniel lost his job the previous winter and they had been forced to move into her place “temporarily.”
“Make her stop,” Margaret shouted from her bedroom.
Emily tightened her hold on Lily and paced faster. “I’m trying.”
“You’ve been trying for an hour!”
