Birth Pangs
Peter Kovacs teaches classes at a community college and tends bar to make ends meet. When a newborn baby is found in a trash can in an alley next to the school, Kovacs has personal reasons for getting involved, including his early life in foster care and the traumatic loss of his and his ex-wife’s unborn child. With the help of a colleague who teaches photography and a detective from the police department’s Children and Family Division, both women, Kovacs tries to track down the missing mother.
Although he develops closer relationships with the two, the search seems to be going nowhere until a lead is provided by one of Kovacs’s students, a young woman he has accused of plagiarism and who accuses him, in turn, of making advances to her. However, a parallel narrative beginning in Japan and involving a Japanese young man who becomes one of the photographer’s students seems to point in another direction. What really happened? Why? And what difference does it make in Peter’s own life?