Most people never really saw me. For decades, I worked night shifts as a janitor, moving quietly through office buildings and highway rest stops while the world slept. My name is Martha, and at sixty-three, invisibility had become familiar. My own grown children had drifted away into lives that no longer made room for me, and I learned not to expect phone calls or holiday visits. Then one cold morning at an interstate rest stop, I heard a sound that didn’t belong in the echoing silence. It was small and broken, a cry that pulled me behind an overflowing trash bin where I found a newborn boy, barely alive, wrapped in rags and fear. I held him against my chest, my uniform smelling of bleach, whispering promises I hadn’t planned to make. In that instant, loneliness loosened its grip, because someone needed me again. Continue reading…
