Page 10 of The Other Mother

THE WIFE IN THE DESERT

S aturday morning light floods through the kitchen windows with a brightness that makes everything look overexposed, like a photograph with too much contrast. Adam stands at the granite island packing his golf bag, each club sliding into place with the satisfying click of expensive equipment finding its home.

He's already dressed for success in his weekend uniform: khakis pressed to knife-edge creases, polo shirt the exact shade of blue that brings out his eyes, golf shoes so white they look like they've never touched actual grass.

He takes a call from his golfing partner, Rick, who moved here from Manhattan last year and still talks about everything in terms of what it cost and how much better it is than what he had before.

"No, no, the new driver is incredible," Adam says, lifting a club from the bag and giving it a practice swing that nearly clips the pendant light over the island. "Completely changed my game. Yeah, I'll bring the Scotch. The Macallan, not the cheap stuff."

He's laughing at something Rick says, the sound echoing off the vaulted ceilings and polished surfaces of our open-concept living space.

Everything in this house is designed to amplify success: the soaring ceilings, the floor-to-ceiling windows, the kitchen island that's bigger than my entire first apartment.

It's the kind of home that belongs in architecture magazines, all clean lines and neutral tones and carefully curated accessories that suggest prosperity without trying too hard.

I watch from the doorway in my terry cloth robe, clutching a mug of coffee I made an hour ago but haven't touched. The ceramic is cold against my palms, the liquid inside probably bitter by now. Everything tastes wrong lately anyway.

The baby monitor sits muted on the kitchen counter, its green light steady and meaningless. Eva has been sleeping for three hours, which should be a relief but feels ominous instead. Like she's conserving energy for something I can't anticipate.

Adam catches sight of me and pulls out one AirPod. "You sure you're okay?" He's already moving toward the garage, golf bag slung over his shoulder like he's posing for a lifestyle catalog. "You need rest. That's all. You'll feel like yourself again."

The assumption that there's a version of myself to return to stings more than it should. As if the woman I was before Eva was born is just temporarily misplaced, like car keys or reading glasses. As if I haven't fundamentally changed, become someone I don't recognize in the mirror.

He kisses my cheek, a distracted gesture that lands somewhere near my ear. His aftershave is too strong, the same designer scent he's worn since our second date, when he was still trying to impress me with his attention to detail.

"I'll be back on Monday. Call if you need anything."

But we both know I won't call. I won't interrupt his weekend of male bonding, wooing a potential client over eighteen holes and expensive Scotch in the clubhouse afterward. I won’t admit that I’m drowning in this life with a baby who doesn’t feel like mine.

The garage door rumbles open and closed, and then I'm alone with the silence that fills this place like gas from a leak. I walk through the living room, my bare feet silent on the polished tile floors. Everything is too staged. I loved it at first, but now it feels like we’re living in a model home that's perpetually ready for potential buyers.

It’s not so much a home, but a set.

The thought stops me cold. I've had it before, this exact phrase, but I can't remember when. It hovers at the edge of my memory like something important I'm supposed to remember but can't quite grasp.

I walk to Adam's home office, a room I rarely enter because it's so clearly his domain. Dark wood furniture, leather chairs, diplomas and awards arranged on built-in shelves pointing to evidence of his success. My laptop sits on the guest chair where I left it weeks ago, probably dead from neglect.

I plug it in and wait for it to boot up, watching the familiar startup screen like I'm greeting an old friend I haven't seen in years.

When I was working, this laptop was an extension of my brain.

I lived in Word documents and email chains, tracking manuscript deadlines and author egos with the precision of an air traffic controller.

Now it feels foreign in my hands.

The desktop loads with icons I barely recognize. And there, in the corner, the Word document that auto-opens every time I start the computer.

Draft_v3_FINAL.docx. Last modified: 6 weeks ago.

My breath catches. Nine weeks ago puts it right around the time Eva was born, when I was too consumed with contractions and fear to think about anything as abstract as writing.

But there it is, the file that represents three years of false starts and abandoned chapters, the novel I never finished because I was too good at spotting flaws to ignore my own.

I double-click the file and watch it open, pages of text I wrote in what feels like another lifetime.

Lena Hart moves to a desert cul-de-sac and starts clocking tiny mismatches: a receipt that doesn’t belong to her, a throw she never bought, a name tag number that shifts between scenes.

A domestic thriller about identity, belonging, and how easy it is for a woman to vanish inside her own life.

I scroll through the chapters, barely recognizing my own words.

The writing is good, better than I remembered.

Tight prose, escalating tension, characters who feel real enough to touch.

I'd forgotten I was capable of this, forgotten the satisfaction of crafting sentences that said exactly what I meant them to say.

And then I reach Chapter 12, and my heart stops.

There, highlighted in yellow, is a sentence that makes my skin crawl:

"The baby came home, but the house felt like a set."

I stare at the words until they blur. I don't remember writing that line. Don't remember highlighting it. The timestamp shows it was last modified at 3:17 AM, but that's impossible. Six weeks ago, I was in the hospital, barely conscious from pain medication and exhaustion.

Unless I wasn't. Unless those missing hours, that gap in my memory between the delivery room and the recovery room, included more than I realized.

I scroll down, looking for more highlighted text, more clues to what my subconscious was trying to tell me. But there's nothing else. Just that one sentence, glowing on the screen like a neon sign in a dark window.

The baby came home, but the house felt like a set.

I close the laptop and push it away, my hands shaking. The office suddenly feels too small, too airless. Like the walls are pressing in from all sides.

I need to get out of this room, out of this house that doesn't feel like home.

But where can I go? I don't know anyone here except the women from the support group, and they're probably busy with their own Saturday morning routines.

Farmer's markets and soccer games and the comfortable chaos of families that function the way families are supposed to.

Instead, I find myself in Eva's nursery, standing over her crib and watching her sleep. She's lying on her back, arms flung out to either side like she's surrendering to something. Her chest rises and falls with mechanical precision, so steady it's almost hypnotic.

I think about who I used to be before this room, before this baby, before this desert house that feels like a stage set for someone else's life.

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. But she 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.