She was in her twenties, homeless, out of money, living in an old car with two young sons, their father in the wind. She was pregnant again. Nine months pregnant. But she didn’t show much, and layered against the winter chill in baggy clothes, she knew no one could tell. This lonely secret was both blessing and curse, she knew. It was all too much.

I can’t keep this one, the woman had been arguing with herself. There’s no money for diapers, or formula, or pretty clothes, or any clothes. I want better than that for this child.

When the time came, she dropped her boys off with a friend and made an excuse for why she’d be gone overnight. The next day, the Saturday before Thanksgiving, she parked in an empty lot and gave birth at five in the morning, cold and alone. She stared down at her new daughter. They cried in tandem.

When the dark sky lightened to gray, she drove the streets of Anaheim, California, looking for signs of life. She found them at an Alpha Beta supermarket on a busy street ten minutes from the city’s great secular mecca, Disneyland. She saw workers bustling around the market, getting ready to open for the new day. This was her chance.

When no one was looking, she placed her two-hour-old baby, wrapped in a faded yellow blanket, by a milk crate next to the store’s grimy trash bins. Then she got back in the car and drove off. Someone would find her, the mother figured. Soon.

Sure enough, within minutes the market’s janitor followed the sound of soft…