The light was coming in the way it did in the late afternoon, the specific Verenza light that she had never loved the way she was supposed to love it, the light of a city that had always felt like soone else’s story that she had wandered into through the wrong entrance.
The furniture was to Leo’s taste. The art on the walls was Leo’s choice.
Even the particular plants on the windowsill, the ones that had survived her inconsistent attention because they were the kind that didn’t require much, had been selected by a man who had been selecting things to make an impression rather than a ho.
She had been living inside Leo’s impression of a life. And she had been stupid enough or lonely enough, which was perhaps the sa thing, not to notice until a courtroom made it undeniable.
He never loved you.
She had known. In the way she had known most things, sideways, at the edge of her vision, filed carefully in the category of not-yet. But knowing and knowing-completely were different countries, and the trial had moved her from one to the other with the brutal efficiency of evidence presented without embellishnt.
She felt stupid.
Not broken. Not devastated in the way she might have expected, she had examined herself for devastation and found sothing flatter and more permanent instead. The specific sha of having been used by soone who was very good at it. The wish, ordinary and sharp, that she had been smarter. Sooner.
She turned from the flat and pulled the door closed behind her.
Did not lock it. The key went into her jacket pocket and would go in a bin sowhere before she reached the station. She did not intend to co back.
The corridor.
She had walked this corridor every day for a year. Had known its particular sounds, the neighbour two doors down who played music at a volu that suggested partial deafness, the pipes that spoke in the early morning, the lift that took slightly too long.
She walked it now with the suitcase rolling behind her and the particular forward-looking energy of a woman who was done looking backward.
Then she stopped.
A sound.
Small. Wavering. The specific pitch of sothing that had been making itself known for a while and had not been answered, and was now communicating the escalating nature of its displeasure with the directness available to it.
A baby. Amira turned.
There, against the wall, near the service door that led to the building’s bin area, wrapped in a pink blanket that had seen better days, in a carry basket that was the kind purchased from the cheaper end of available options.
A baby. A very small, very unhappy, very alone baby. Amira set her suitcase down.
She approached the way you approached sothing that might be fragile, carefully, with the particular gentleness that ca before understanding, before the situation had fully assembled itself into sothing her brain could process.
She crouched.
The baby registered her presence with the imdiate biological response of a newborn in proximity to a warm body, the crying altered register. Still there, still urgent, but differently urgent. The urgency of there is soone, I can feel soone, please.
Amira picked her up.
Automatically. Without deliberation. The kind of action the body perford before the mind had finished its discussion.
The baby was very light. And very warm. And had the most extraordinary eyes.
They were open, wide open, in the way newborns opened their eyes when they had been worked up enough that nothing in them was sleeping and they were blue.
Amira looked at those eyes.
And felt sothing she had not felt in a very long ti, possibly had never felt in quite this form, move through her chest.
She asked around.
Of course, she did. Knocked on the nearest door, checked the bin area, stopped the neighbour who appeared at the end of the corridor with the blank expression of soone who had heard nothing and seen nothing and was largely preoccupied with other things.
Nobody knew. Nobody had seen. Nobody had any information to offer about a baby in a pink blanket outside the service door, as if she had simply arrived there on her own.
The baby, in Amira’s arms, had stopped crying. Was looking at her. With those eyes. Amira looked back.
"Oh dear," she said softly.
She said it the way you said things that were true before you had fully decided what to do with the truth.
"It seems you’ve been abandoned." The baby made a small sound. Not in agreent exactly. But not disagreent.
"Like ," Amira said.
She stood in the corridor of a flat that was no longer hers, with a suitcase at her feet and a train ticket for a destination she hadn’t yet decided, holding a baby nobody had claid, looking into eyes that were the colour of sothing she couldn’t imdiately na but felt she recognised.
She made no deliberate decision.
No calculation. No weighing of consequences and legalities, and the obvious, imdiate, practical reality of her situation, the record she had, the charges that had only recently resolved themselves, the absolute impossibility of any formal process going in her favour.
None of that was the thing that happened. What happened was simpler than all of it. She pulled the pink blanket a little tighter. She picked up her suitcase. And she walked to the lift.
The train station was a twenty-minute taxi ride through Verenza traffic.
Amira used the ti to buy formula and a bottle from the pharmacy near the rank, managing it with one arm while the baby occupied the other, with the specific improvised competence of soone who had no idea what they were doing and was doing it anyway. The pharmacist looked at her. She looked back. He packaged her purchase without comnt.
In the station, she found a bench.
Fed the baby, figuring out the temperature and the angle with the trial-and-error of soone who had never done this before, who was learning in real ti, who was making it work through the simple refusal to stop trying until it worked.
The baby fed. The baby’s eyes stayed open the whole ti, looking up at Amira with that specific, unsettling, steady blue attention.
Amira looked back. She thought about Amara.
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