Page 40 of The Other Mother
A baby cries somewhere far away, muffled by walls and distance. But the sound is wrong somehow. It's unfamiliar, almost foreign.
A nurse appears beside my bed, her smile faint and professional. Her badge is turned away from me, the name hidden against her scrubs.
"She's okay. Just rest now."
I try to sit up, desperate to see my baby, to hold her, to confirm that everything is real. But pain slices through my side like lightning, forcing me back down onto the pillows.
"I want to see her," I manage to say, my voice barely above a whisper.
The nurse reaches for something on my IV pole, adjusting tubes and monitors with practiced efficiency. Someone else enters the room. It’s a woman in dark scrubs I don't recognize. She's older, more severe, with gray hair pulled back in a tight bun.
Panic rises in my chest like flood water. "Where's my baby?!"
The woman in dark scrubs speaks to someone outside the curtain, her voice low but carrying clearly in the quiet room. "We need help in here."
Suddenly there are strong arms holding me down, pressing my shoulders into the mattress. I struggle against them, but my body feels disconnected, like it belongs to someone else.
A sharp pinch at my arm. An injection.
"No—wait?—"
"She's hysterical," a voice says from somewhere above me. "She's not stable."
"We had to sedate the mother."
Everything starts to float. My vision swims, the ceiling tiles blurring into abstract patterns. As consciousness slips away from me like water through cupped hands, I see something that freezes my blood.
In the hallway beyond the curtain, another woman is screaming. Security guards are pulling her back, their hands firm on her arms as she struggles against them. She's thin, pale, desperate, and for just a moment, our eyes meet through the gap in the curtain.
She looks like Mara.
I jolt awake in the nursery, my heart hammering against my ribs. Eva is crying, the same rhythmic cry from my memory, the one that doesn't sound quite right. I pick her up automatically, shushing her softly as I rock back and forth on the floor.
"It's okay," I whisper. "I was there. I saw you."
But even as I say the words, doubt creeps in like cold air through a cracked window. The woman in the hallway, the one being dragged away by security. Was that real? And if it were, what did it mean?
I look down at Eva, studying her face in the pale light from the nightlight. Her features are delicate, perfect, beautiful. But in this moment, holding her close after the vividness of that memory, I feel something shift inside me.
"Wait," I whisper, my voice barely audible in the quiet room. "Was it you?"
The question hangs in the air between us, and suddenly I don't know who I'm talking to.
22
BURIED FILES
The coffee shop in Palm Desert feels like neutral territory, far enough from our house that I won't run into Adam. But close enough that I can get home quickly if something goes wrong. It's one of those aggressively hip places with exposed brick walls and Edison bulb fixtures, the kind of spot I would have loved back in the OC.
I'm early, so I order a large coffee and find a corner table where I can see the entrance. My hands shake slightly as I set up my laptop, and I wonder if this is what desperation looks like, sitting alone in a coffee shop at ten in the morning, asking favors from people I haven't spoken to in months.
Lex Tamin arrives exactly on time, looking exactly the same as they did when we were in that writing group together two years ago. Short-cropped hair, thrift store vintage t-shirt, the kind of effortless androgynous stylethat I always envied but could never pull off. They moved here about a year before I did to be closer to their retired parents. Lex spots me immediately and slides into the chair across from me with the fluid grace of someone who's comfortable in their own skin.
"I didn't expect a maternity mystery when you said 'writing research,' " they say, pulling out their own laptop, a sleek machine that probably costs more than my car payment.
I'd texted them yesterday, after spending another sleepless night in Eva's nursery with the door barricaded. Adam had eventually gone to bed, but I'd heard him on the phone in our bedroom, his voice too low for me to make out words. He is planning, or arranging, something. The thought had made my skin crawl.
Lex had been the tech-savvy member of our old writing group, the one who helped everyone set up websites and navigate digital publishing platforms. But more importantly, they'd freelanced in IT security before deciding to focus on their novel. If anyone could help me access files that weren't meant to be accessed, it would be them.
