Page 56 of The Other Mother
Emergency Custodial Reassignment Form - Coachella Valley Medical Center
Patient: Claire Bernard Matthews
DOB: 03/22/1987
Assigned Infant: Female, DOB: 09/03/2024
And there, at the bottom, my signature. The same signature from the hospital footage Lex showed me. Theone I signed while sobbing, while sedated, while begging them not to let my baby die.
But the metadata at the bottom of the page tells a different story:
Created by: A. Matthews
Date Created: 09/03/2024
Last Modified by: A. Matthews
I stare at the screen until the words blur. He created this form the day of Eva’s birth. Why?
I scroll through more files. Email threads between Adam and someone named J. Harper. Was this June Harper, the nurse, I spoke to?
There are screenshots of bank transfers with amounts that make my head spin. And then, buried in a folder labeled "Archive," I find something that stops my breath entirely.
A scanned photo of a death certificate.
"Evelyn Grace Matthews"
Born: 09/03/2024
Died: 09/03/2024
Cause: Respiratory failure
The baby from the grave. The one Mara visited. But according to this certificate, she was mine. My biological daughter who died the night she was born, the night I can barely remember through the fog of medication and grief.
I print everything. Page after page, the printer humming and clicking in the quiet house. Each sheetthat slides into the tray feels like evidence of a crime I'm only beginning to understand.
My phone buzzes.
A text from Adam:Running late. Might grab lunch at the clubhouse. See you around 3.
Three hours. I have three hours to figure out what my husband did to me.
I keep digging. In another folder, I find a video file labeled "Insurance Review." I click play.
It's security footage from the hospital, but different angles than what Lex showed me. This one shows Adam in the hallway outside the maternity ward, talking to a woman in scrubs. They're too far from the camera for me to make out words, but their body language is clear. He hands her something - an envelope. She nods and walks away.
The timestamp shows this happened six hours after I gave birth. Six hours after my daughter died.
I fast-forward through more footage. There's Adam again, this time at the nursing station. A clipboard in his hands. He's signing something, pointing at papers, nodding as a nurse explains something I can't hear.
And then, in the final clip, I see myself. Unconscious in a hospital bed, IVs snaking from my arms. Adam stands beside me, holding a baby I now know isn't mine. He's not looking at the child in his arms. He's looking at me, his face a mixture of grief and something else I can't quite name.
Calculation, maybe. Or resignation.
The video ends. I sit in the silence of his office, surrounded by the evidence of his betrayal, and try to make sense of what I've learned.
My biological daughter died. Adam arranged to give me another child - Mara's child - to spare me the grief. But that meant stealing from a mother, forging documents, bribing hospital staff. It meant building our family on someone else's forced loss.
