She often wondered what life would be like if they hadn’t lost their babies. Would their marriage have survived? Their friendship? After that last miscarriage, once Becca fully recovered, she told Christian it was time to discuss other options. “We can still be parents. Fostering. Adoption. There are plenty of children that need homes,” she said. Christian agreed. “We’ll build a family of our own.”

Fostering a teenager wasn’t something they discussed. It wasn’t something Becca had even considered. Ash was one of life’s unexpected surprises. She’d done her best to reassure him. “I promise you, she’s special. All she needs is someone to believe in her. To fight for her and make her feel safe.”

He agreed. She didn’t bully him into it. They sat down over dinner and a bottle of rosé and made the decision together. Like every decision that came before it. Then things got too hard. His infidelity was a betrayal she could never forgive. She blinked, the humiliation as fresh today as it was two years ago.

Christian made a right and headed east, Skid Row coming into focus. This Los Angeles neighborhood stretched from the area east of Main Street, south of Third Street, west of Alameda Street, and north of Seventh Street, spanning almost fifty city blocks, a homeless population ranging from eight to eleven thousand.

It was almost impossible to prepare someone for the sheer magnitude of suffering you witnessed when you arrived on Skid Row. Becca had been here hundreds of times and yet she still braced herself as her car sped past rows and rows of tents and tarps, homeless encampments. Outside the tent cities dozens upon dozens of people, lost souls, hungry, high, or craving a fix, lurched and shuffled down the streets.

If you somehow found yourself dropped into this neighborhood without any explanation or understanding of where you were, you could realistically believe the world you once inhabited no longer existed; maybe a zombie apocalypse or the fallout from a nuclear war were to blame. There had to be some explanation for this massive sea of human suffering. Unfortunately, this homeless crisis wasn’t a cinematic creation. It was a combination of human error and hubris, a political battle that resulted in creating what was now one of the biggest homeless encampments in the country. Every time Becca came to Skid Row, she recalled the George Bernard Shaw quote she’d read in her freshmen comp class: “The worst sin towards our fellow creatures is not to hate them, but to be indifferent to them; that’s the essence of inhumanity.”