I turned the car seat toward him, showing off the pink-faced and chubby infant, sleeping peacefully. I smiled at her perfection. Oliver didn’t.

“We’ll talk about this inside,” he said, his voice verging on frantic.

I stepped into our naked house, the family following me, and in the dim living room light, Oliver looked at me with so many questions I couldn’t read them all. I set down the car seat and touched my pocket where the scrap of paper with the license plate number crinkled beneath the denim. I had two choices—to tell the truth, or to lie.

The only real choice was to lie. Because Oliver could never handle the burden of truth. The truth would have required I turn the baby over to children’s services or suffer the guilt of keeping her illegally. Oliver, like I used to be before tonight, was a law-abiding blinker-using citizen. So I took the burden upon myself. Lie, it was.

“Before you panic, I found her on the side of the road.”

“You know you can’t keep her, right?” Joe rarely chimed in with unsolicited advice, which caught me off-guard.

“Hear me out,” I pleaded. “I have no idea where she came from, but here’s the thing. If we turn her in to the police, they’ll likely find her parents and she’ll end up right back in the horrible situation she was already in. But if we keep her, she’ll lack nothing! She’ll get endless love. We’re her second chance at a great life.”

“There’s proper channels for this.” Joe again. “She needs to be in the custody of the state where they’ll place her in foster care. Maybe you could then arrange to be her foster parent and adopt her.”

“Do you know how long of a process is involved? There’s no guarantee I’ll get her.”

“I’m pretty sure you’d go to jail if anyone ever found out, Felicity,” Cody added. “I’m pretty sure it’s considered kidnapping, even if you technically didn’t steal her.”

I couldn’t help but notice Oliver’s silence. What was he thinking? I needed to appeal to his shared desire for a family.

“We’ve been waiting for a baby, Oliver. What if this was what we were waiting for? We’re her miracle just as much as she’s our miracle.”

Still Oliver contemplated, or perhaps he was in shock. I’d never known him not to have a strong opinion, about everything from what color to paint the bathroom to who played the best James Bond (his pick: Daniel Craig, though Sean Connery still did it for me). No one spoke, just stared. At me. At the baby. Her eyes peeled open and she cooed, pursing her lips and rolling her head, searching for a nipple.