With both hands, Ethan brushed away the top leaves.
They slid aside in crisp rustling clumps, revealing a faded blue fleece blanket tucked over something rounded beneath. His pulse jolted. He stripped away another handful. More blanket.
The edge of a woven picnic basket. Something pale inside that moved—or seemed to. He snatched the leaves back harder, exposing a tiny clenched hand, red with cold, then the side of an infant’s face under the blanket.
Ethan froze.
For a single impossible second, the world narrowed so completely that he could hear only Ellie breathing behind him and the dog’s low anxious whine at his shoulder. The baby lay swaddled in blankets inside the basket, cheeks mottled pink and pale, eyes squeezed shut, mouth opening weakly in a cry too small to match the enormity of what Ethan was seeing. The cold had quieted it. The dog had not been guarding some object or warning them off trash. It had been standing watch over a human life.
“Oh my God,” Ethan said.
That sentence became the hinge on which the rest of their lives turned.
Later, when Ethan tried to explain the next few minutes to Detective Lena Morales, he would say the events happened both all at once and with impossible slowness. He shouted for help toward the path, though there was no one close enough to answer immediately. He ripped off his jacket and wrapped it over the blanket. He told Ellie, in the calmest voice he could manufacture, to stand back but not be afraid.
He called 911 with shaking fingers and struggled to force his own speech into useful order. There is a baby in the park. Hidden in leaves.