The guys all turn, startled. The girls’ basketball coach looks up from her clipboard, and there must be something on my face—something in the stunned echo of my voice across the empty space—because she takes one look at me, then she follows me into the locker room at a run.

“Back there.” I point.

She rushes around the end of the bank of lockers, clearly aware that whatever she’s going to find will be bad. But she can’t possibly know how bad. If she did, she wouldn’t be in such a hurry to see it.

She gasps, and I hear a thunk that can only be her knees hitting the concrete floor.

I head down the aisle again until I can see around the end of the lockers, where Coach Killebrew is hunched over the duffel bag. She turns to me, and she looks … broken.

“It isn’t breathing.”

I know.

“We’re too late.”

I know that too.

“Beckett?”

Jake bursts into the locker room, but he stops in the threshold, his right palm holding the door open. Behind him, several other guys are on their toes, peering over his shoulders.

“What happened? Are you okay?”

“Out!” Coach Killebrew shouts as she steps into the main aisle again, holding her phone. “And keep the rest of the students back.”

I don’t know if there’s anyone else out there, other than Jake and the basketball guys, but there will be soon. The bell ending sixth period is about to ring, and seventh period is optional, so all the athletes and band kids will be traipsing through the gym on their way to the far parking lot.

Jake backs out of the locker room and lets the door swing shut, as Coach Killebrew dials.

“Nine-one-one, what’s your emergency?” the voice on the other end asks.

“This is Angela Killebrew, up at the high school. One of our students found a baby in a duffel bag, in the girls’ locker room. It isn’t breathing.”

The shock of her words—of hearing it out loud—snaps my focus back to the open gym bag, where it snags on a distinctive white blotch marring the crimson on the right side, near the bottom. I dig my phone from my pocket and open the camera app. I don’t understand what I’m seeing. I don’t know whose baby this is, or why it isn’t moving, or why the hell someone would leave it in a duffel bag in the girls’ locker room.

But I know who that bag belongs to.

I tap the camera icon, and my phone clicks as it takes a photo.

Coach Killebrew doesn’t hear the click. She’s still talking to the 911 operator, and by the time she rounds the lockers again to pull me back from the duffel bag, I can hear the sirens.