Chapter One
~ Jai ~
It was a Tuesday night on SE Belmont, wet enough that the air felt like soup and the sodium streetlight at the mouth of the alley looked more like a traffic accident than a light source.
If I’d had a choice, I would have been inside already, sunk into my third mug of Yunnan gold, writing soft core fanfic about the bartender who still carded me every Friday even though I was closer to thirty than eighteen.
Instead, I had a grocery bag in one hand, a half-unwrapped cherry sucker in my cheek, and the distinct pleasure of stepping in something that squelched.
I cut behind the bakery because it shaved two minutes off my walk, which is the only reason I ever cut behind the bakery. The alley was never just an alley.
It was an aromatic dissertation on human neglect: bins steaming with rot, old fryer oil from the Thai place at the corner, puddles of rainwater shimmering with whatever iridescent byproduct the laundromat flushed after hours.
The streetlight’s orange glow didn’t reach this far, so everything was colorless except for a blue flicker from the 7-Eleven sign bleeding through chain-link at the far end.
I was about to turn left at the dumpster when my boot caught on the edge of a cardboard box wedged against the metal. Not alight kick, either—a full toe-stub, like the box was trying to mug me.
The box moved.
Something inside made a sound.
I hesitated.
I had a healthy respect for the surprises Portland’s dumpsters could produce, ranging from live raccoons to the time I found an entire set of twenty-pound kettlebells, still boxed, with a sticky note that just said “TAKE.” I’d seen things. But this sound didn’t track.
It was too... high-pitched, and not in a rat way.
I crouched, convenience bag scraping against damp brick, and used the tip of my boot to pull the box clear of the dumpster. It was a liquor box, the cardboard softened by rain but not enough to collapse. On the side: HANDLE WITH CARE, in bold print.
The irony was not subtle.
The sound happened again. This time it was a soft mewl, the kind that slides right into your eardrum and short-circuits the part of your brain that likes to pretend you don’t care.
I pressed two fingers to the top flap and peeled it back, expecting kittens or, at worst, a possum. What I found was a newborn baby. Human. Pink and furious. Swaddled in a men’s flannel shirt that was the wrong size, wrong color, and already soaked halfway through with something I did not want to identify.
She was so small I thought I’d hallucinated her. Red-faced, shrieking, her eyes squeezed shut and her hands balled into fists.
My hand came up, involuntarily, like I was going to shush her, but the absurdity of that made me laugh—a rough, startled sound that came out of me before I could stop it.
Three seconds, we just stared at each other. Me, crouched in the filth, a grocery bag of ramen packets and milk in one hand,a bright red lollipop in the other, and her, a newborn girl who’d already figured out that the world was garbage and she was probably on her own.
I pulled the lollipop out of my mouth and stared at it for a second, then tucked it into the breast pocket of my jacket. I peeled off my jacket—olive canvas, no sentimental value, but dry enough to matter—and wrapped it around the baby like I’d done this a thousand times. I hadn’t, but I was good with my hands.
Army Ranger training does that.
The jacket cocooned her, and I tightened it behind her back with one hand, using my teeth to hold the sleeve closed. The other hand got under her head. She was cold. Not the blue-lip hypothermia kind of cold, but not far off.
“Fuck,” I said, which didn’t help. “You couldn’t have just been a raccoon?”
She made a sound like she agreed. Or maybe she was just breathing. It was hard to tell under all the noise.
There was a move, here—a branch on the decision tree. Hospital, police station, or home. I ran the math in my head, fast, eyes darting down the alley to check for other signs of human life. Nobody. Not even a bored teenager or a night shift dishwasher catching a smoke. The bakery’s security cam blinked red over the back door, but I didn’t care. Let them think I’d stolen a baby. I didn’t have time to worry about public image.
I got up, keeping the baby wedged tight against my chest, and hooked the grocery bag into the crook of my arm. My car was three blocks north, parked behind the florist because the closer spaces were all “permit only” and the city was ruthless about tickets after 6 p.m. I started walking, boots skidding on slick asphalt, every sense dialed up to eleven.
The baby’s head pressed against my sternum. The weight was nothing but the reality of it was massive. I’d held hand grenades with less caution.
I adjusted the jacket once, twice, until I could feel her cheek against my skin, damp and weirdly hot. Her smell was new-baby and flannel and old cardboard, layered over the baseline of damp alley and garbage.
