"I couldn't track her down anyway, I don't know who her parents are or what she was named. --I mean, really named, I named her Nita."

"They didn't even let you know her name?"

AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA

"Well, it's not my kid, you know, I'm the incubator. --Sorry, we can change the topic, I'm prone to depressing oversharing because everything about my life prior to eighteen months ago was depressing and talking about it is oversharing."

"I mean, everything I say has the subtext of 'and everyone I knew died a thousand years ago for them and a week or so ago for me' so I can't really complain about other people being depressing. --I can stop poking, if you want."

"No, it's fine. It's nice to talk to someone else who lost everything else they knew. --I mean, not that it's the same, I recognize microwaves and you liked Chang'an."

"It's not the same, but-- we can be Horrifying Backstory Buddies."

"In Cascadia they kill the kids. If they're born too sick to survive. It's better."

"...That'd probably be for the best.

--we just left them in graveyards. And we didn't even have the excuse of bitoxiphosphene."

"We can keep them alive for so long now. Months. In incubators that breathe for them, where they're eating from IVs, machines that cuddle them for you because they're too fragile for you to hold them, and they cry and cry or, worse, they don't cry at all--"

"...God. And you'd just keep going, because maybe they'd make it--"

"No, they wouldn't-- I mean you'd always hope, but-- the bitoxiphosphene babies don't ever get long. But it's murder to kill them, you know, and a blessing to give them what little bit of life they can have."

"Gilead. -- you get that a lot, probably."

"After my sixth kid died I figured-- well, I was going to kill myself and go to Hell, or I was going to turn away from God and go to Hell, and I figured I wanted to do the second thing because in the second one I could eat chocolate chip cookies."

"Chocolate chip cookies are worth it."

"They're really great, aren't they?"

"--But the way I see it is that Heaven is eternity with God and I don't want to spend eternity loving the person who murdered my children."

"From what I've heard, someone needs to go over his head and tell him to fix his priorities."

"You guys believe the universe was designed by committee, right, that seems much more plausible."

"More or less. And there's plenty of evidence for it!"

"Anyway. My son died and I decided I was going to be evil so I stole all my husband's money and faked his signature and paid my vacation fee to go to Cascadia."

"That-- honestly seems like a proportional response."

"Yeah. If he wanted me not to steal his money he shouldn't have hit me."

"Incredibly proportional!"

"I kept going, you know, if I were good enough he'd stop, and then I ran off to Cascadia and now no one hits me and I can be as awful as I like."

"There's a point where-- it doesn't matter if you're allowed to do something, you shouldn't? ...Which is a roundabout way of saying that everything I've heard about your husband makes me dislike him."