For weeks after the funeral, I hardly spoke to anyone. I ignored calls until my phone simply stopped ringing. I barely ate enough to notice I was hungry.
Finally, my best friend, Foster, showed up at my apartment one morning, threw a duffel bag into the bed of my truck without asking, and said, “If I leave you here one more day, you’re going to bury yourself right alongside her.”
He drove me to a quiet stretch of coastline three states away, a place called Sable Point Beach neither of us had ever visited before, chosen mostly, I think, because it was far enough from everything familiar that I couldn’t simply drive myself back home the second he wasn’t watching.
We spent most of that first afternoon walking the shoreline without talking at all.
PART 2
As sunset approached, I wandered away from Foster toward a row of empty beach changing cubicles near the boardwalk, mostly just needing somewhere to sit alone for a few minutes.
Then I heard it.
A baby crying.
Then a second one, joining the first.
I pulled back the thin curtain of the nearest cubicle, and there, lying on the sand inside, were two newborn girls, wrapped separately in a white beach towel and a pale pink one, both embroidered along the edges with small blue sailboats.
Nobody else was anywhere nearby. No note. No bag of supplies. Nothing at all beyond two crying infants and two towels that looked, unmistakably, like they’d been bought together as a matching pair.
Police searched for weeks afterward, working with every hospital and clinic within a two-hundred-mile radius. Nobody ever came forward. No missing mother was ever reported matching the timeline.
I visited the girls in temporary foster care every single day for six weeks, until a social worker named Priscilla Adeyemi finally asked me the question I hadn’t let myself consider seriously.
“Have you ever thought about adopting them yourself?”
I stared down at their two small faces, and for the first time since I’d buried Renee and our daughter, I felt something in my chest besides grief.
