Chapter 3
[Trinity]
“Congratulations.” The brunette-haired child services agent offers me a shaky smile before her gaze dips to the baby in my arms. The poor thing has tired herself out from crying so much.
I glance at my mother. With short, white hair in a wavy bob, she looks like a model in an older woman’s magazine. In her early seventies, Mary Haven is one of my best friends, and the first person I called after discovering a baby on my back stoop.
I am still in shock.
Seconds after discovering the baby, a robust, ebony-skinned woman, wearing a sharp-looking, black pantsuit, came around the back corner of my house.
“Oh good, you are home.” She appeared out of breath, ample chest heaving, but her smile was kind, her eyes sympathetic.
Had she buzzed the front door, and I hadn’t heard it?
“I hate to drop and dash like this, but if I can get back on the road, I can make it home by midnight.” She shrugged a diaper bag off her shoulder and held it out to me, then pulled a large manila envelope from the outer pocket of the bag.
“Everything is explained in here.”
I’m not certain I blinked, staring at the outstretched rectangular envelope in one of her hands and the strap of a pink bag in the other.
“She’s all yours.”
Without thinking, I took the bag and the offered envelope, watching blindly as the woman bent at the waist, set her hands on her knees, and cooed at the baby.
“Be a good girl.” Her voice softened. “Make your momma proud.”
With that said, she stood to her full height again, reminding me of a bear. A great brown one you want to cuddle despite knowing she’s dangerous.
Seconds later, she was gone, and I was holding a screaming baby in an attempt to soothe her.
I still didn’t understand what was happening.
My first call should have been to the sheriff.
I glance at Stone Sylver seated across from me in one of the two chairs opposite the couch next.
The tall, broad, mustached-in-the-modern-way man is an old family friend.
Heck, he was practically family. His younger sister is going to marry my older brother one day.
Plus, Stone grew up side-by-side with Cortland.
The two were inseparable for most of my childhood years.
Stone offers me a kind but cautious twist of his lips.
From the law’s standpoint, he doesn’t like this situation.
A baby dropped off on a doorstep in the early light of a spring evening.
The ring camera on my front porch didn’t detect the make or model of a vehicle outside my house.
As the baby was dropped off on the back stoop, and I don’t have a camera facing the backyard, she must have parked down the block and slipped onto my property from the side.
The outer limits of my camera’s projection only caught a bulky shadow along the edge of my driveway before she was out of range.
In the envelope provided was a birth certificate, naming the baby: Baby Girl Olsen. Along with the certificate was a letter explaining how I’d apparently helped care for the baby in the NICU.
The mother had no immediate family.
The baby was one month old.
I vaguely remember a young woman recently having a child.
No family present. No partner at her side.
She didn’t visit the baby in the NICU, at least that I’d noticed during my shifts, and we were on the verge of calling child protective services when someone came to claim the newborn. I was not on duty that day.
Apparently, the mother saw how deeply I cared for the infant from the start. She felt confident I was the right person to take her child.
She also recognized my last name and produced an ancestry report showing we were somehow fifth cousins. I haven’t been able to process the chart.
I still couldn’t quite process what was happening.
Was I being cruelly punked? Or had I been dropped into a scene from Baby Boom?
I was no Diane Keaton. And I definitely did not have a Sam Shepard in my life.
The letter included with the birth certificate further explained how Marissa Olsen was a college student, twenty-one years old, and on the cusp of a bright future.
Her parents were dead, and she didn’t want to raise a baby.
She wanted the sweet thing to go to a family member, albeit a distant one.
The baby had been delivered to me by a former nanny trusted by the co-ed.
“Is any of this legal?” I direct my question to the case worker.
She shrugs, though the motion is not dismissive. “At this point, the situation is considered abandonment. With consent to offer her up for adoption.” She nods toward the envelope on the low table in front of my couch.
“With your background, and our area’s lack of baby placements, I’d appreciate if you could keep her here with you for a few days while I sort everything out. If you’d like to proceed with adoption, the process can take up to twelve months in West Virginia.”
“Adoption?” I roll the word over my tongue.
The option was one Dart wanted to consider when the doctors told me the older I got, the harder it would be to conceive, even with medical assistance.
Geriatric pregnancy. What a term for a woman over thirty-five having a baby. Insulting, and surprising, when over thirty percent of current pregnancies involve women over thirty, some well into their forties.
It’s still possible, I’d argued with Dart. I could still get pregnant. Having faith in science and biology and anything else that gave me hope. But after three miscarriages, the last one nearly killing me, Dart had had enough of trying.
I almost lost you, Trin.
I didn’t see how it mattered. He’d left me anyway.
I look down at the sweet, cherub-faced baby swaddled tight in a pink blanket. The wrap tucked around her gives her a sense of security as she dozes on my lap.
I’ll keep you safe, too. It shouldn’t be a thought.
Yet, something deep within the well of my gut says this little one belongs with me. We’ve both been abandoned. We both have so much love to give. We both need love in return, and I’m open to sharing my heart with her.
All the stored-up heartbreak shatters just by looking at her round cheeks and button nose. Her little lids are closed and flutter. She shudders a wispy breath like she can hear my thoughts, and agrees.
We need each other.
Hope rushes up my sternum, settling behind my ribs, constricting my airway, and yet wrapping around me, like the security blanket around this child.
Hope is literally in my arms. All my dreams, right in my hands.
Still, I say, “Let me think about it.”
The current situation is dangerous. The risk of attachment is great. Hope is a risky pill.
Yet, I stare down at the sleeping babe.
What a gift.
A baby.
Delivered by a giant stork, who looked like a bear, dressed in a black pant suit like a modern-day Mary Poppins.
My heart fills with love, like the slow slosh of the first pour of liquid into an empty cup.
Stone clears his throat. “Gives me time to find the girl. Talk to her.”
The case worker gives Stone a skeptical glance.
“I’m happy to keep her a few days,” I acknowledge, drawing the child service worker’s gaze back toward me. She gives me a grateful smile. She’s just as overworked as I am. And I briefly wonder if she overworks herself to drown loneliness, like I do. Helping others compensates for being alone.
She already knows about my extensive background. The formal education and hours of experience in my line of work are on file with the state. I’m clearly qualified to take care of a baby.
Emotionally, however, this is a lot to process.
An hour ago, I was preparing for book club, ready to buy myself a new self-soothing plaything after a rough day at the hospital, and now . . .
I gaze down at the sleeping baby once more. Her little lips pursed, occasionally quivering. A natural instinct to suckle. Her eyelids flutter again, a sign she is dreaming. She doesn’t have eyelashes yet, but her cheeks are pink cherries.
She’s perfect. And apparently, mine. For now.
Again, I glance at my mother. Her dark eyes are damp with both love and concern. She’ll support any decision I make.
Within twenty minutes of my stunned call to her, she was here, baby formula and diapers in hand, plus infant hand-me-downs from my niece, Ruby James.
Which reminds me, this baby needs a name. Something precious like her. Something unique.
“I think I’ll call her … Mirabelle.”
Wonderous miracle.