“No foster care. You should keep her.” Everyone turned to look over at Debra, the most law-abiding blinker-using one of us all.

“Mom, what are you saying?” Cody replied.

She shrugged, reached down and unclipped the car seat, lifting the baby into her arms. Her gaze fixed lovingly on her new granddaughter. “I don’t know if Cody will ever give me grandkids, and you two have been trying for a while with no luck, so what if this is my only chance to be a grandma?”

“Mom, you’re talking crazy. They shouldn’t steal a baby just to fulfill your dream of being a grandmother,” Cody grumbled.

“It’s not like I’m the only one who wants this,” Debra said pointedly. “Felicity was created to be a mom. She’d be amazing at it.”

“And how do you propose they get away with it?” Joe asked.

“It won’t be hard.” Debra turned to me. “Sweetheart, all you have to do is go to the hospital tomorrow pretending you’ve given birth at home, and ask how to file for a birth certificate. They’ll help file one for you. I’ll go with you. Considering she looks to only be a day or two old, she probably doesn’t even have a birth certificate yet. Once they issue that, we just…raise our beautiful little addition to the family as our own. And never speak of what happened tonight—ever. She must never know. If we can all do that, everything will be fine. It’ll be more than fine. She’ll have a wonderful home, you’ll have the most loved baby in the world, and no one will ever know the difference.”

“Are you kidding?” Joe yelled. “Oliver could go to jail over this. How could you endorse this madness?”

“You know why, Joe.” Debra shot him a silencing glare, her word stern and final.

“Is this about you? Because it shouldn’t be. It should be about the baby. And about our kids staying out of jail.”

“What’s he talking about, Mom?” Cody asked.

“Nothing,” Joe interjected, holding his hand out to end the conversation.

“Mom?” Cody pleaded.

“No, it’s not nothing. They deserve to know,” Debra said. “When I was little, my biological parents abused me. Tortured me, actually. It was a horrific life, if you even want to call it a life. They tried to hide the abuse from everyone by pulling me out of school, never letting me leave the house. Eventually I slipped outside one day and I just kept running and running until I had no idea where I was, but I was more afraid of being in that house than I was being lost out on the streets.”

Tears welled in her eyes as she sniffled, adjusted the baby in her arms, and sucked in a breath.