Page 16 of The Other Mother
I was good at my job. Really good. I had an eye for story structure, for character development, for the kinds of plot holes that make readers throw books across rooms. Authors trusted me to make their work better, to find the weak spots and strengthen them without losing the heart of what they were trying to say.
I specialized in psychological thrillers. Women in jeopardy, unreliable narrators, the slow reveal of secrets that change everything. I could spot a twist from chapter one, predict the villain by the midpoint, identify the clues that seemed random but would prove crucial by the end.
The irony isn't lost on me now. I spent years analyzing stories about women who couldn't trust their own perceptions, and now I'm living in one.
My mother would have found this funny, in her dark way. She had a bitter sense of humor that got sharper as the cancer spread, like pain had burned away everything soft and left only the essential core of who she was.
"You're too smart for your own good, Claire," she told me during one of our last conversations. I was reading to her from a manuscript I was editing, a thriller about a woman who thinks her husband is trying to kill her. "You see all the problems, but you never trust your instincts about the solutions."
She was right. I was brilliant at diagnosing what was wrong with other people's stories, but I could never finish my own. Too afraid it wouldn't be perfect, too paralyzed by the possibility of failure to risk success.
I left my job six months into the pregnancy because I was tired of being the person who fixed other people's dreams instead of pursuing my own. Eva was supposed to be a fresh start, a chance to become the writer I'd always wanted to be while raising a child who would grow up seeing me as someone who took risks, who finished what she started.
Instead, I'm standing in a nursery in the desert, holding a baby monitor like a lifeline, wondering if the child sleeping in front of me is even mine.
I'm no one now. Not an editor, not a writer, not even a mother if I believe what I'm feeling. Just a woman in a terry cloth robe in a house that doesn't feel like home, caring for a baby who doesn't feel like mine.
The monitor in my hand crackles softly, and I freeze.But it's just static, the electronic whisper of empty air. No voices today. No messages from whoever was trying to warn me about something I'm still too afraid to understand.
I look down at Eva, still sleeping with that unnatural stillness that makes me count her breaths to make sure she's alive. Her dark hair catches the morning light streaming through the blackout curtains I never close completely. She's beautiful. Perfect. Everything a mother should want.
So why do I feel like I'm looking at someone else's child?
The house is too quiet around us, filled only with the hum of expensive appliances and the whisper of climate-controlled air. Outside, the desert stretches endlessly in all directions, a landscape so alien and hostile that it makes me homesick for places I've never been.
I think about the highlighted sentence in my manuscript, written at a time when I should have been unconscious, in pain, focused on nothing but survival.
The baby came home, but the house felt like a set.
What if my subconscious was trying to tell me something that my conscious mind wasn't ready to hear? What if the story I was writing about a woman who couldn't trust her own perceptions was actually about me?
I reach into the crib and touch Eva's cheek with one finger. Her skin is warm and soft, undeniably real. Butshe doesn't stir at my touch, doesn't turn toward me the way babies are supposed to turn toward their mothers.
She sleeps on, peaceful and still, like she's waiting for someone else to claim her.
8
MISMATCH
Isit cross-legged on the hardwood floor of the nursery, my back against the cream-colored wall. Eva sleeps in her bassinet two feet away, her chest rising and falling in that rapid rhythm that still makes me hold my breath sometimes, waiting to make sure the next one comes.
The baby book lies open across my lap, its white leather cover already showing smudges from my fingertips. I flip through the pages slowly, trying to ground myself in the facts. Hospital discharge photos. Birth stats written in my shaky handwriting: 6 pounds, 2 ounces, 19 inches long, Born 3:42 AM. There's the wrinkled bassinet tag I peeled off and taped to the page before we left the hospital, the adhesive already yellowing at the edges.
My phone sits beside me, screen glowing in the dim afternoon light filtering through the blackout curtains. Iscroll through my camera roll, searching for comfort in the digital proof of Eva's first days. Here's the first photo, me holding her in the hospital's standard bassinet, my face puffy and exhausted but smiling. Adam hovers in the background, looking awkward in his wrinkled button-down, the same shirt he'd been wearing for thirty-six hours.
I swipe to the next photo. A nurse adjusting Eva's swaddle, her name tag reading "June" in cheerful blue letters. I remember June. She had kind eyes and showed me how to burp Eva properly, her hands gentle but confident as she demonstrated on the practice doll.
The third photo makes me pause, but not for the reason it once would have. Eva is swaddled in that same plain pink, brown-trim blanket I found days ago— the one with the wrong initials, the one Adam shrugged off like it meant nothing. But I already chased that thread. What catches me now is something I hadn’t noticed before.
Her bracelet.
My frown deepens as I study the phone screen. "Did I bring that one?" I whisper to the empty room. "Or did someone else wrap her in it?"
I check the timestamps again. The photos are only three hours apart. The bracelet shouldn't have changed. Hospital policy is strict about these things. I remember the orientation video they made us watch, the stern-faced administrator explaining how every item that touches the babies is tracked and documented.
Something cold settles in my stomach.
I need clarity. I need facts. I push myself up from the floor, my legs stiff from sitting, and walk to my dresser. The keepsake box sits on top, pushed to the back corner where I won't accidentally see it every day. I've been avoiding it since we brought Eva home, afraid that opening it would somehow make everything feel too real, too permanent.
