What happens when a death occurs within your body, but you survive? Two days after Christmas, law lecturer Hannah Robert, eight months pregnant, was driving her partner and stepkids home from a picnic when their car was crushed by a four-wheel-drive. Hannah's baby didn't survive.

When Hannah told her story in court, the judge wept. In her struggle to make sense of the personal and legal aftermath, Hannah had to find out what it means to mother a dead child and to renegotiate her own relationship with hope. Her powerful story is written with clarity and beauty, shining light on an unimaginably dark event and is, unexpectedly, tempered with life and promise.

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Hannah Robert is a law lecturer at La Trobe University Law School. She writes about legal parentage, law and pregnancy, family law, feminism, colonial legal history and her own babies, both living and dead. Paved with Good Intentions: Terra Nullius, Aboriginal Land Rights and Settler-Colonial Law, was published by Halstead Press, and her writing has appeared in The Conversation, the Journal of Law and Medicine, the Australian Feminist Law Journal and Good Weekend.