The morning I found the baby split my life into a before and after, as sharply as a knife cutting paper. I was dragging myself home from another graveyard shift, eyes gritty, brain fogged, fingers stiff from the cold. All I wanted was to warm my hands around a bottle of pumped milk and maybe collapse for twenty minutes before my son woke. Then I heard it—a thin, frayed cry threading through the early traffic noise. At first, I ignored it. New mothers hear phantom cries all the time. They live in our bones. But this sound sharpened. Real. Scared....
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