I was driving alone on Christmas Eve when my tire blew on a deserted New Mexico highway. A cry in the darkness led me to a newborn baby in a hatbox. I held her close to warm her and lost my heart to her right there. I raised her as my daughter, but eight years later, someone came to take her back.I drove down an empty highway on Christmas Eve with both hands on the wheel.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Same ritual as every year: radio off, headlights cutting through the desert dark as I headed to my parents’ house in New Mexico. I told myself I liked the quiet, that I’d chosen that life.Years ago, I’d driven this same road with a woman in the passenger seat. Sarah.I brought her home for Christmas Eve. I thought she was the one. Then I caught her with my best friend a week before we were supposed to get married.That was when I learned that loneliness was just another safety word.Snow drifted lightly across the asphalt, catching in the headlight beams like static. I was running late. The sun had already vanished behind the mountains.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
I was driving alone on Christmas Eve when my tire blew on a deserted New Mexico highway. A cry in the darkness led me to a newborn… <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":25418,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-25417","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"views":300,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/newsinbr.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/25417","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/newsinbr.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/newsinbr.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/newsinbr.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/newsinbr.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=25417"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/newsinbr.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/25417\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":25419,"href":"https:\/\/newsinbr.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/25417\/revisions\/25419"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/newsinbr.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/25418"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/newsinbr.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=25417"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/newsinbr.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=25417"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/newsinbr.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=25417"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}