Chapter 241: Found a baby
The light was coming in the way it did in the late afternoon, the specific Verenza light that she had never loved the way she was supposed to love it, the light of a city that had always felt like someone else’s story that she had wandered into through the wrong entrance.
The furniture was to Leo’s taste. The art on the walls was Leo’s choice.
Even the particular plants on the windowsill, the ones that had survived her inconsistent attention because they were the kind that didn’t require much, had been selected by a man who had been selecting things to make an impression rather than a home.
She had been living inside Leo’s impression of a life. And she had been stupid enough or lonely enough, which was perhaps the same thing, not to notice until a courtroom made it undeniable.
He never loved you.
She had known. In the way she had known most things, sideways, at the edge of her vision, filed carefully in the category of not-yet. But knowing and knowing-completely were different countries, and the trial had moved her from one to the other with the brutal efficiency of evidence presented without embellishment.
She felt stupid.
Not broken. Not devastated in the way she might have expected, she had examined herself for devastation and found something flatter and more permanent instead. The specific shame of having been used by someone who was very good at it. The wish, ordinary and sharp, that she had been smarter. Sooner.
She turned from the flat and pulled the door closed behind her.
Did not lock it. The key went into her jacket pocket and would go in a bin somewhere before she reached the station. She did not intend to come back.
The corridor.
She had walked this corridor every day for a year. Had known its particular sounds, the neighbour two doors down who played music at a volume that suggested partial deafness, the pipes that spoke in the early morning, the lift that took slightly too long.
She walked it now with the suitcase rolling behind her and the particular forward-looking energy of a woman who was done looking backward.
Then she stopped.
A sound.
Small. Wavering. The specific pitch of something that had been making itself known for a while and had not been answered, and was now communicating the escalating nature of its displeasure with the directness available to it.
A baby. Amira turned.
There, against the wall, near the service door that led to the building’s bin area, wrapped in a pink blanket that had seen better days, in a carry basket that was the kind purchased from the cheaper end of available options.
A baby. A very small, very unhappy, very alone baby. Amira set her suitcase down.
She approached the way you approached something that might be fragile, carefully, with the particular gentleness that came before understanding, before the situation had fully assembled itself into something her brain could process.
She crouched.
The baby registered her presence with the immediate biological response of a newborn in proximity to a warm body, the crying altered register. Still there, still urgent, but differently urgent. The urgency of there is someone, I can feel someone, please.
Amira picked her up.
Automatically. Without deliberation. The kind of action the body performed before the mind had finished its discussion.
The baby was very light. And very warm. And had the most extraordinary eyes.
They were open, wide open, in the way newborns opened their eyes when they had been worked up enough that nothing in them was sleeping and they were blue.
Amira looked at those eyes.
And felt something she had not felt in a very long time, possibly had never felt in quite this form, move through her chest.
She asked around.
Of course, she did. Knocked on the nearest door, checked the bin area, stopped the neighbour who appeared at the end of the corridor with the blank expression of someone who had heard nothing and seen nothing and was largely preoccupied with other things.
Nobody knew. Nobody had seen. Nobody had any information to offer about a baby in a pink blanket outside the service door, as if she had simply arrived there on her own.
The baby, in Amira’s arms, had stopped crying. Was looking at her. With those eyes. Amira looked back.
"Oh dear," she said softly.
She said it the way you said things that were true before you had fully decided what to do with the truth.
"It seems you’ve been abandoned." The baby made a small sound. Not in agreement exactly. But not disagreement.
"Like me," Amira said.
She stood in the corridor of a flat that was no longer hers, with a suitcase at her feet and a train ticket for a destination she hadn’t yet decided, holding a baby nobody had claimed, looking into eyes that were the colour of something she couldn’t immediately name but felt she recognised.
She made no deliberate decision.
No calculation. No weighing of consequences and legalities, and the obvious, immediate, practical reality of her situation, the record she had, the charges that had only recently resolved themselves, the absolute impossibility of any formal process going in her favour.
None of that was the thing that happened. What happened was simpler than all of it. She pulled the pink blanket a little tighter. She picked up her suitcase. And she walked to the lift.
The train station was a twenty-minute taxi ride through Verenza traffic.
Amira used the time to buy formula and a bottle from the pharmacy near the rank, managing it with one arm while the baby occupied the other, with the specific improvised competence of someone who had no idea what they were doing and was doing it anyway. The pharmacist looked at her. She looked back. He packaged her purchase without comment.
In the station, she found a bench.
Fed the baby, figuring out the temperature and the angle with the trial-and-error of someone who had never done this before, who was learning in real time, who was making it work through the simple refusal to stop trying until it worked.
The baby fed. The baby’s eyes stayed open the whole time, looking up at Amira with that specific, unsettling, steady blue attention.
Amira looked back. She thought about Amara.
