I lifted the tailgate.
“Please,” she whispered. “Don’t tell your husband you found me yet. Please.”
I tried to pull back, but she held on.
“Who are you?” I asked. “What are you doing in my husband’s truck?”
She glanced past me toward the driveway, terrified.
“My name is Maya. Please, just close the door halfway. If he sees the light on, he’ll come.”
I did what she asked, my whole body trembling.
“If he sees the light on, he’ll come.”
“Maya, I’m going to ask you one more time. Who are you, and why is my blanket over you?”
She sat up slowly, and that’s when I saw it.
A small bundle tucked against her chest.
Something wrapped in a faded blue blanket that had clearly been washed a hundred times.
A baby.
A real, living, breathing baby.
“Who are you?”
I felt the ground tilt beneath me.
“Oh my God,” I breathed. “Is that… is that a baby?”
“She’s four days old,” Maya whispered. “Her name is Hope. I named her that on purpose.”
“Maya, I don’t understand. Why are you here? Why did Ben put you in the truck?”
She looked down at the baby, then back at me.
“He didn’t put me here. Not really. He found me walking through your neighborhood this morning. I was trying to work up the courage to knock on your door.”
“Why did Ben put you in the truck?”
“My door?”
“Yours, Sarah. Not his. I came here for you.”
The way she said my name made me freeze.
She knew who I was.
She had known who I was before tonight.
“How do you know my name?”
She knew who I was.
Maya’s lip trembled.
She pulled the baby a little closer.
“I’ve been reading your blog for months. The one you wrote about… about wanting to be a mother. About the doctor’s appointments and the miscarriage last spring.”
I gripped the edge of the tailgate.
“Nobody knows about that blog. I write it anonymously.”
“Nobody knows about that.”
“I know,” she said softly. “I found it because of him, so I knew who you were. And I kept coming back because you sounded like the kindest person I had ever read. You sounded like the mother I wished I had.”
Tears blurred my vision.
“Maya, please. Why are you telling me this? What is going on?”
She glanced toward the fence again, checking for shadows.
“When Ben found me on the sidewalk this morning, he panicked. He said if you saw me, everything would fall apart.”
“What is going on?”
“He told me to wait in the truck and he would bring me food and figure things out,” she continued. “He said he’d handle it.”
“Handle what?”
“Me. The baby. He said he’d give me money and put me on a bus tonight after the fireworks.”
The world went very quiet.
I looked at the small dimple in the baby’s cheek.
And I understood something I didn’t want to understand.
“He said he’d handle it.”
“Maya,” I said slowly. “Whose baby is that?”
