Helena was sitting on a hard plastic chair in the hallway. I might have walked right past her without seeing her if she hadn’t said my name. I stopped and sat next to her. “I can’t stay long; I have to go get Al,” I told her apologetically. She just smiled.

“It’s all right, I don’t want to keep you. I just…I’m not sure. I think I may take the afternoon off when this ordeal is finished and I was wondering if you’d like to have lunch?” she asked hesitantly.

I smiled. “Sure, I’d like that. I have to go drop Alice off at the station, but I’m free after that if want to give me a call.”

Helena agreed, and I went back across the lot to find Alice waiting for me outside the psychologist’s building. She looked concerned, but not upset. I gave her a quick rundown of seeing Helena and asked her if it would be all right if I had lunch with her.

“Of course you can have lunch with Helena. She needs a break! I just hope that poor little baby will be all right,” Alice said thoughtfully.

“I’m sure it will be, Helena said she was there to talk with Social Services,” I replied. Alice was silent on the way to the station, looking thoughtful. She told me to have a good lunch without really seeming to be in the moment, and I watched her walk inside a little worriedly, calling after her to call me when she was ready to be picked up.

Helena looked like she was going to fall asleep into her soup. But she wanted to tell me about the case from that morning. The baby, a girl, was surprisingly healthy considering her mother was a heroin addict and who knows what else, but she was premature and was going to be kept in the neonatal unit in an incubator for several weeks for observation, possibly up to a month. The mother had a warrant out for her arrest and with such a strong addiction, there was no way she’d be able to care for the child, so Social Services was going to try and find some other relative to take the child until the mother could be released into society again. But failing that, Helena was sure she’d be seeing the baby again when the Center worked with foster services to find a place for her.