Chapter 4: Where Did You Get That Baby?
Mia hated the question the moment it left the man’s mouth again, quieter but no less dangerous.
“Where did you get that baby?”
There was no safe answer in a grocery store full of eyes. If she said my brother, people asked for parents. If she said I’m just watching him, people asked for the adult who had left her in charge. If she said someone gave him to me, the air changed into emergency.
So she said the version that had kept them moving for weeks.
“He’s my responsibility.”
Adrian’s face tightened. “That’s not the same thing.”
“It’s the only thing that matters right now.” Mia felt Leo’s bracelet catch lightly against her thumb as she adjusted him. She wanted to shove the charm under the onesie sleeve, hide it, swallow it if she could. Too late. The man had already seen. The damage was already living in his eyes.
The clerk raised both hands slightly. “Maybe we should call—”
“No,” Mia and Adrian said at the same time.
They looked at each other, startled by the agreement.
Mia recovered first. “If you call, they’ll separate us. They always talk about safety right before they do.”
Adrian glanced at the clerk. “Give me five minutes. Please.”
Something in his tone—moneyed, controlled, but fraying—made the clerk hesitate long enough for the moment to continue.
Adrian lowered his voice for Mia alone. “I’m not asking because I think you stole a child in an aisle. I’m asking because that bracelet belonged to my sister’s son. He vanished with her. If this is him, then you are holding the center of a search that has consumed my family for years.”
Mia’s stomach dropped.
Years.
She had been told to watch for certain kinds of men: clean coats, careful voices, soft offers, questions about the bracelet. She had been told that some of them would call themselves family. She had been told family was not automatically safe.
Her mother’s friend—no, the woman who had become their temporary shelter before the last bad night—had knelt in front of Mia and said, If a man in expensive clothes recognizes the bracelet, you do not explain. You leave.
But the woman was gone now.
The last room was gone.
The milk had become the whole day’s mission.
And Leo was hungry in her arms while a man who looked like he might faint from recognition blocked the easiest line to the door.
“I didn’t steal him,” Mia said again, weaker.
“I believe you,” Adrian replied. “But someone did something. Because that child should not have been surviving on a girl’s promise in a grocery store.”
Mia felt tears burn hot and humiliating at the edges of her eyes. She hated crying in front of adults. Crying made them decide things faster.
“I only wanted milk,” she whispered.
Adrian looked at the carton, then at Leo, then at her too-big hoodie and dirty face. The shock on his features had not vanished, but something steadier was moving in beneath it.
“I know,” he said. “And I’m still offering more than that. Food. A safe room. No police in this doorway. But I need you to walk outside with me before this becomes a scene we can’t control.”
Mia’s arms ached. Leo’s weight had become both love and burden hours ago. The word safe tugged at her so hard it almost hurt.
She did not trust him.
She also did not know how many more nights she could invent safety out of nothing.
“If I walk,” she said, “and you try to take him—”
“I won’t,” Adrian said. “Not like this.”
Mia wished promises sounded different when they mattered.
Still, after one long suspended second, she nodded once.
May you like
Outside first.
Milk in hand.
Leo against her heart.
Leave the fluorescent light before the store decided it owned the ending.
