My husband going to jail for my crime was absolutely not fine. I didn’t understand how telling the cops that we found a baby on the side of the road, and decided to keep that baby, would then help find that baby who grew up to be a fifteen-year-old runaway named Vera. We had no name for her biological parents, no original birth certificate, nothing but a verbal confession that we picked up a nameless orphaned newborn girl swaddled in a car seat and took her home and fell in love.

At first it didn’t sound so bad, certainly not criminal, to rescue an abandoned child. But over the years I’d read countless news reports on women who stole babies and went to prison for twenty-years-plus. I scoured the internet for the worst-case criminal implications of taking an abandoned child. In one situation, a mother was charged with infant abduction and sentenced to twenty-two years for rescuing a child she found in an abandoned car in a parking lot. Another woman was charged with kidnapping and sentenced to twenty years for not reporting the baby she found in a Dumpster to the authorities. Twenty years in the pokey seemed to be the average penalty. Two decades of missing out on Eliot’s middle school science projects, high school graduation, college campus tours, meeting his girlfriend, maybe even missing his wedding. If I was lucky and got out early on good behavior, I might get to be there when he had his first baby.

Then there was Sydney. What three-year-old could survive without her mama? Especially a child with kidney failure? Not being there to remind her when she needed to rest, monitoring her diet, taking her to doctor appointments, mommy kisses to distract her from the many shots, fighting her way up the organ transplant list…not being there for Syd scared me more than anything.

“How are the cops going to be able to find something out of nothing?” I argued. “We literally have no idea where Vera came from, so without a past to trace her back to, what good will involving the police do?”

“How did Vera find out? If a teen can do it, certainly the cops can too.”

“I wish I had your faith. It sounds like we’re just setting ourselves up for disappointment.”

“Listen, Felicity, we have to at least try. We won’t know what the cops can find out until we tell them everything. What if they’re able to find something out through a DNA match? If she’s got a relative who’s in the criminal system, they might be able to use that.”