Book excerpt: Rebecca Filmore is a hard-working, single mother who must juggle trying to pay the rent, and raise a young, five-year-old daughter, named Caroline, in the year 2012, that she had during a night of hard love-making with a fellow college co-ed named Thomas McGlover, who ends up abandoning their relationship.Rebecca is then left with a dilemma, as Christmas approaches, and she gets so behind on her rent that her landlord threatens to throw her and her daughter out in the street, and she ends up deciding to abandon Caroline into the care of a middle-aged police detective named Paul Dablonski, who also has to decide whether to leave this poor, innocent, frightened, little girl in the care of Child Protective Services, who will put her into "the system,"during the holidays, or will he take her in as he tries to find her mo