Chapter 3

"Oh, my Lord, isn't that something."

Mrs. Porter leaned out of the apartment across the hall, alarmed. "They found an abandoned baby in the courtyard downstairs this morning. Face burning red, poor thing wasn't even responding. Ambulance took him ten minutes ago. Just breaks your heart."

Every bit of color went out of Caleb's face.

He stared at me, eyes threaded red. "You really did leave him outside?"

I stopped, too.

I had left that baby on Lydia Vaughn's doorstep. I'd rung the bell and waited across the street until I saw her carry him in.

So how had he ended up in our courtyard?

Before I could work it out, Caleb yanked me toward the stairs.

"Caleb! What do you think you're doing?" my father barked.

Caleb didn't hear a word of it. "The hospital. Right now."

My mother tried to get in front of him and he shoved her out of the way.

He half-dragged me into a cab and told the driver, in a voice that kept breaking, to go to Kingsbury Children's Hospital.

The whole way there he muttered that it was fine, he was going to be fine.

I watched him fall apart and felt nothing.

In my first life, when the cancer pain had me flat on my back with a fever of a hundred and four and I begged him to take me in, he told me to take something for it and stop making a production of it.

Now it was his child, and he was frantic.

There's a certain comedy to it. Nothing hurts until it's your turn to feel it.

In the emergency department, Caleb practically took hold of the first nurse he saw until she told him where the baby was.

Then he dragged me stumbling down the corridor.

We hadn't even reached the door when I heard a woman crying.

Inside, Lydia Vaughn had the baby against her chest, flushed and breathing in short, hard pulls, her cheek pressed to his forehead and tears coming off her chin one after another.

"Sweetheart, it's okay. It's okay." Her voice broke on it, and anyone in the room would have said that woman was terrified for that child.

Caleb rushed in, and his eyes went red instantly. Then he spun on me, and the hatred coming off him nearly filled the room.

"Sabrina! Are you satisfied? Look at him! Pneumonia, seizures, he almost-" His voice tore. "He's barely two months old. How could you be that cold?"

I looked at the small fragile thing on the bed and felt absolutely nothing move in me.

In my first life the three of them drained my youth and my health and climbed on my family's connections the whole way up.

And then stood there and watched me stop breathing.

Whether this one lived or died was not my concern.

"Cold?" I turned to look at Lydia. "Caleb, yesterday I put this baby on Lydia's doorstep myself. I left a note with him. So tell me..."

I let it sit a moment. "How did he spend the whole night outside and turn up in our courtyard at dawn?"

Lydia stared at me, all shock. "Sabrina, what on earth are you saying? Today is the first time I've laid eyes on this poor baby. I'm a nurse here, they pulled me down to help in pediatrics, and I picked him up because he was this sick and nobody was with him-"

The tears started again. "If you really had left a baby at my door, do you think I could have left him out there all night?

"If I'd been the one to find him, I'd have taken care of him.

"The three of us grew up together, Sabrina. You know exactly what kind of person I am."

I frowned.

I used to think Lydia was gentle and guileless too. That's why, when I gave up my place overseas, I had my father pull strings so the opening would go to her.

Watching my best friend go live the dream I'd set down.

I was glad to do it.

What I never saw coming was Lydia turning up years later as my son's biological mother.

As the woman Caleb had been in love with the entire time.

It took me until I was dying in that bed to understand how stupid I'd been.

I watched them both without saying anything.

Caleb looked at Lydia, delicate and streaming tears, and something flickered across his face a few times.

Then he drew a breath, and his eyes settled, and he stepped forward to stand between me and the two of them.

"Lyd, you don't have to say anything else. I believe you."

Then Caleb reached into his bag and took out a document.

The cover was brand new. The title was impossible to miss.

CERTIFICATE OF ADOPTION.

He opened it and turned the inside page to face me.

My name was printed across it in black and white.