A blaring noise, in the middle of the night, woke me from my sleep as I peeled my eyes open. The incessant crying of what sounded like a stuffed pig caused me to rip the covers back from my body. Who the fuck had a damn pig in this complex? For god’s sake, it was two in the morning and I had one of the most important business meetings of my life in a few hours. Dealing with different time zones was a pain in the ass, and it didn’t matter that I was worth a few billion dollars; sometimes you just had to stroke the potential “client’s” ego.

But I had no intention of making them a client. I had every intention of purchasing their little “business” outright and taking my pet project underneath my global conglomerate umbrella.

The crying got louder as I approached the main room of my penthouse suite, and for the first time, I found myself cursing the stars I could see over New York City as the crying grew louder and more piercing. The floor-to-ceiling tinted windows is what made me buy this place: I could press a beautiful pair of tits up against the glass and thrust into the warm, tight caverns of a woman’s body while surveying the beauty of the stars.

It really was a sight to behold.

I pressed the heels of my hands into my tired and aching eye sockets and my ears latched onto the dying sound. The explosive and rattling crying was now fading into the background, and I felt anger bubbling up in me even more. Of course the crying would stop just as I had made it out of bed and reached the great room. I turned towards the phone and went to dial the downstairs security officer to let him know someone had smuggled a damn baby pig into the complex. Furthermore, I wasn’t paying to clean up pig’s blood off of some bastard’s carpet if he was trying to slaughter the damn thing.

And what happened then?

I heard

it; the slightest little sound of a sniffle.

Pig’s don’t fucking sniffle.

I strode to my front door and ripped it open, looking left and right to see from where the sound might have been coming. My mind was hazy with sleep and my body was screaming to climb back into bed before I had to get up and piece myself together into a nice suit for a damn conference call being sent halfway across the world. But just before I went to go shut my door I heard it again.

I looked down to where I had heard the sound.

Sitting at my feet was a little cradle, no bigger than the fruit basket sitting in my kitchen. It had a bottle, a diaper, a pink-and-yellow blanket, and a note.

A note attached to the bonnet of a child.

The fuck was a child doing sitting at my door at two in the fucking morning?

I watched as the child’s big, blue eyes slowly fluttered themselves closed, and the splotched redness of its face told me the stuffed pig sound had been coming from it. This child, who was tucked away in a basket far too small for its chunky size, was sitting in the hallway of the most prestigious apartment complex in this damn town.

Who the fuck let someone up here to drop off a child?

I grabbed the handle of the basket and slowly tugged the child up. I picked it up and carried it over to the intercom before I mashed the button, and when the familiar voice from downstairs rang into the room I didn’t even let him finish his sentiment before I spat the words out at him.

“Why the hell is there a child at my doorstep, Franz?”

His pause told me he was just as startled at the question.

“Did… you say…a… child, Mr. Blake?”

Theodor Franz was the most intuitive man I had ever met. What the security guards lacked in profession Franz made up for with experience. The guards were trained to pounce and ask questions later, while Franz simply understood people. He knew when something was wrong, he knew when something was right, and he knew when to question people coming into the complex before letting them through the front doors.

He also wasn’t too bad to have a drink with at the local.

The man can hold his whiskey.

So when Franz is just as confused as I am, as to how a baby got placed in front of my door in this apartment complex, it means someone either ducked him or deceived him.

Neither of those had ever been done on his watch for as long as I’d known him, and I’d lived in this complex for over a decade.

“Mr. Blake?” Franz asked again.

Then the child struck up its annoying sound again. Tears barreled down its reddened cheeks, and its arms were struggling to get free, and the sound caused Franz to hang up immediately as I stood there staring at the struggling little …person.

“Please stop crying,” I murmured lowly.

I swept myself into the kitchen as the haggard haze of my interrupted sleep began to lift from my mind. I swung the basket up onto the table before I grabbed the bottle and flung off the cap, and just before I went to go stick the clear nipple into the toothless, screaming mouth of this randomly abandoned child, the note caught my attention again.

I propped the bottle up with a random dishrag I grabbed and sighed at the silence.

I grabbed the note and fumbled to get it open, and the very first line gave the entire mystery away.

My Build-A-Bear,

There was only one person in the world who had ever called me that. A stupid nickname that came into existence because of a stupid gift I gave an ungrateful woman a year ago: a woman who proclaimed to love me before vanishing into thin air; a woman who packed her bags in the middle of the night and abandoned her apartment lease before I could propose.

The only woman I had ever trusted to want me for me instead of for my money…

I turned my attention back to the note as the child on the counter began to gulp audibly.

My Build-A-Bear,

I’m so sorry for leaving the way I did. Please understand that I loved you with every fiber of my being, but you are who you are: the billionaire rock star with eyes of sparkling emeralds and skin of amber glass.

She always did have a way with words.

I figured she had abandoned me. Gracie’s free spirit was why I had been so drawn to her. Every day of my life is scheduled to the minute with meetings, conference calls, paperwork, and dinner outings with current and future clients. However, Gracie always knew when to swoop in and throw my life into a tailspin. She’d drag me on random adventures through the woods and surprise me with cake I shouldn’t eat and with wine that was way too expensive for her to purchase, and she’d sit with me as we watched the stars. She was just fine with never going out, and she always blamed it on her profession. A “starving author” she called herself, always crafting books halfway through before abandoning them for another idea –

• Just like she was abandoning this child… probably for another idea.

When I found out I was pregnant, I knew it would ruin what we had: the spontaneity; the excitement. I also had a feeling you wouldn’t abandon the lifestyle you lived in order to raise a child with me.

The fuck did she know about me, anyway? Yes, I loved the fine wines, fine foods, and fine women, but my parents raised me to be a responsible human being. My parents themselves suck, but I built everything I have now from the ground up, doing nothing but running numbers and opening accounts, for Christ’s sake!

I would’ve taken care of my own fucking child!

But, something’s come up. I can’t explain it right now; it is way too long. But, I can’t take Clara with me.

Clara.

I flicked my eyes back over to the child, whose eyes were now closed. The white liquid in the bottle was slowly leaking out of the side of the baby’s mouth, and I knew enough to know that probably wasn’t good. I put the note down and reached over to remove the bottle from the child’s mouth, and I watched as it squirmed in order to get comfortable.

Wait… not “it.”

“She…”

I watched as she squirmed in order to get comfortable.

I stared at the child for a while; I mean really studied her. I took in the shape of her eyes and her wispy brown hair. I looked at her cute button nose and her perky red cheeks. I looked at the shape of her lips and the light dip in the middle of her chin, but it wasn’t until my eyes drifted over her hands that I saw it.

I saw the same little crook in her pinky finger that I had.

My eyes drifted back over to the note as my heart slowed to a dangerous pace.

Take care of her. You’re all she’s got now. And, if I can, I’ll come back for her.

I’ll come back for you both.

Love,

Gracie

“You really did mean ‘baby’, didn’t you?” Franz asked.

I jumped and crumpled the note in the palm of my hand. My eyes widened as they trailed over to Franz standing in the entrance of my kitchen, and his eyes were locked tight onto the child sleeping in the basket.

“Jesu- don’t you ever knock?” I breathed.

“I figured niceties could be set aside until I figured out exactly what was going on,” he stated.

“And yes,” I sighed. “I meant ‘baby’.”

I studied Franz’s face as he ran through his entire evening. Franz was wholly dedicated to this place: his daughter used to live here. Though one of the richest real estate tycoons in the business, and he came and visited her often. But one day, the previous doorman made a slip-up that cost him the life of his daughter, and his way of grieving was offering his services to work the shifts the previous doorman wasn’t working.

When they saw how dedicated he had become to vetting people that came in and out of this place, they found the money to offer him a permanent position as the night-shift doorman.

“I took a bathroom break,” he sighed. “I took a damn bathroom break.”

“Franz. You can’t beat yourself up because you had to take a piss. You’re human,” I said.

Franz was slowly gravitating towards the child. His body appeared to be succumbing to the pull of some mystical force he couldn’t see or even explain, and soon he was standing on the other side of the basket, his arms slowly rising into the air towards the baby.

“May I?” he asked softly.

“Be my guest,” I chuckled.

He dipped in and picked up the sleeping child while I ran my hands through my hair. I could’ve gone and gotten a DNA test to see if it – she – really was my child, but between the child looking as much like Gracie as she did and having my recessive crooked pinky fingers, there was no doubt in my mind.

This girl was my child, and that’s why Gracie ran away from me.

“Fuck!” I screamed out loudly out of the silence.

Then, of course, the crying started again.

“It’s alright little one. Sssshhhh…” Franz started in. He cooed the little girl back to sleep in his arms as I looked on, dumbfounded. This child really existed, she was supposed to be my flesh-and-blood, carrying around my DNA in her crooked little pinky fingers, and I had no idea what the hell I was supposed to be doing.

“What does the note say?” Franz whispered before he nodded to my hand. I had forgotten that I was still clutching onto the crumpled piece of paper.

“Just that Gracie dumped me with a kid that’s mine and won’t be coming back,” I spat.

Franz just nodded.

“Do you wanna hold her?” he asked.

“She looks comfortable,” I shook my head. “I’m good.”

In the span of a few seconds, I had fallen from the top of the world into the bowels of Hell, all the while listening to the echoing screams of a stuffed pig.

A stuffed pig, I might add, I had helped to create.

“What the hell am I gonna do, Franz?” I whispered.

Then, he gave me the single greatest piece of advice that would change the course of the rest of my life.

But, at the time, I thought he had just gone as crazy as I had.

“Hire a babysitter,” he answered easily, and then he smiled.