A childless couple mourning the loss of their only son goes for a long walk in the snow and makes an incredible discovery that changes their lives.

It’s hard to say where stories start, especially this one. You could say that the beginning of this story is the tail end of another, but we can’t keep going back and back to the beginning, so we have to start here: A woman got off a bus in a small town in Omaha.

She clambered down heavily, supporting her heavy belly with one hand, and one of the passengers stepped forward to lend a hand. “Get off me!” she snarled, “I’m no cripple!” And she wasn’t, but if the bus driver was any judge, she was about nine months pregnant and near her time.

So a woman climbed off a bus in a small town in Omaha in late winter, pregnant and with no luggage except for a faded green backpack she dragged by its straps. The passenger who’d tried to help her said, “Listen, there is a hospital two blocks down…”

But she turned her head away and started walking. As it turned out, she did end up at that hospital later that evening, straining and screaming, her face swollen with effort.

The nurses clucked and cooed when she delivered a baby boy, but she just turned her face away sullenly. “When can I get out of here?” she asked. She was told the doctor would be by in a few hours to see her and the baby and that in the meantime she should rest.

So she turned on her side and pretended to fall asleep, but as soon as the noise in the small ward died down, she was up, quick as a cat. She pushed her clothes into the backpack, and whatever she could pilfer from the room along with it.

She hesitated over the baby sleeping in the perspex crib next to her bed. Then she picked him up and wrapped him roughly in one of the blankets from her bed. She pushed open the door. The coast was clear, and in a second she was gone.

Once out on the street, she slowed down. She looked at the baby in her arms. “I don’t need this…” she said. Yet she walked past the town’s police station and the fire department and headed for the road out of town.

Despite all she had been through, she was a quick walker, and soon she was past the last of the softly lit townhouses and into the treeline of the forest. It was there that she stopped, dropped the backpack, and stood for a moment, hesitating.

She held the sleeping baby and looked down at it. What she felt and why she did what she did is part of another story, what matters to us is that she said in a voice that was not ungentle, “You sleep now, kid, it won’t hurt, not like life hurts.”

And she carefully placed the baby under the blued moon shadow of a tall spruce and turned her back and walked away, out of this story, and on to another. That baby just lay there, wrapped in that blanket, not knowing it was abandoned.

Maybe if it had known it would have woken up, screaming, begging for rescue. Who knows? It was so quiet in those woods, and so peaceful. Only an owl flew around the tree on whispering wings to investigate.

Love heals the deepest wounds.

But not far away, within screaming distance, in fact, another part of another story was coming to an end. A man and a woman were doing the hardest thing anyone born with a heart can do: say goodbye to a child.

John and Fallon Sorenson had been married for ten years, and their biggest dream had been to have a baby. They had been overjoyed when Fallon fell pregnant and they welcomed a sweet baby boy they named Ryan.

Of course, Ryan was perfect, just like every other baby in the world, and his parents adored him. He grew so fast! What his parents and the doctors didn’t know — couldn’t know — was that something else was growing just as fast.

One little vein in Ryan’s brain was swelling and growing like a balloon, and then one day the balloon burst, and just like that, Ryan was gone. He was just two.

Fallon and John were in shock. How was it possible for their baby to be running along the beach one moment and just gone the next? “What kind of God lets this happen?” Fallon kept screaming.

And of course, nobody answered her, because nobody knew. After a while, Fallon stopped screaming, but John thought that was even worse because she’d just sit there, not moving, not speaking.

Then Fallon started to walk. She’d put on a coat and shoes and just vanish into the woods for hours and hours at a time. She always came back, but John knew how easy it is to get lost, and how dangerous.

On this particular night, John was watching TV when Fallon suddenly got up and put on her coat. “Hun,” John asked. “Where are you going?” But Fallon didn’t answer, so John grabbed his own coat and cell phone and followed her out.

In just a few minutes, Fallon was already just a smudge in the moonlight, so John ran to catch up with her. “Fallon!” he cried, “This has to stop!” He turned her around and looked into her face.

“Ryan is dead, but I’m alive, and you’re alive,” John said angrily. “Stop this once and for all!” But Fallon wasn’t listening to him at all. She had her head tilted and she was frowning.

“There’s a baby…” she said.

“You’re IMAGINING things!” John screamed, really angry now, “THERE IS NO BABY OUT HERE!” And that was when the distinctive, unmistakable sound of a baby crying filled the night.

Dazed, John called an ambulance, and before long the baby was safe and warm and being fed formula at the hospital’s neonatal unit. The authorities tried to find the baby’s mother but to no avail.

They finally acceded to the Sorensons’ request, and Fallon and John adopted him and called him Thomas. Fallon still believes that God guided Thomas into their lives, and I guess maybe I believe it too.

What can we learn from this story?

• Every child deserves to be wanted and loved. Luckily, life or his guardian angel put loving parents in Thomas’ path.
• Love heals the deepest wounds. Even though no one could take the place of their son, the Sorensons found healing in loving little Thomas who needed them.

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