Page 12 of The Other Mother

THE NOVEL

Eva finally settled down an hour ago after another round of crying that seemed to echo off every wall in the house.

The baby monitor sits on my nightstand, its green light pulsing softly in the darkness like a tiny lighthouse.

I can hear the faint white noise from her room, the mechanical hum that's supposed to mimic the womb but sounds more like an old refrigerator to me.

I slip out of bed carefully, my feet finding the cool hardwood floor.

The laptop sits on the dresser where I left it weeks ago, buried under a stack of thank-you cards I still need to write for baby gifts.

I haven't touched it since my third trimester, when sitting upright for more than twenty minutes made my back scream in protest.

I settle into the reading chair by our bedroom window, the same overstuffed armchair where I used to curl up with coffee and write for hours before Eva came. Before everything changed. The laptop takes forever to boot up, its fan whirring to life like it's annoyed at being awakened.

I don't want to return to my research tonight.

I can't handle diving back into hospital protocols or baby identification procedures.

After days of Adam being gone and me alone with my growing list of discrepancies, I need to escape into something familiar, something that belongs entirely to me.

I'm not ready to tell him what I found yet.

The mismatched bracelets, the unexplained blanket, the growing certainty that something isn't right.

How do you tell your husband that you think there might be something wrong with your baby?

How do you say those words out loud without sounding like you're losing your mind?

My novel .

The document appears on screen: “Borrowed Time – Draft v3.” I haven’t looked at it since I made those discoveries about Eva’s hospital bracelets, afraid of what else I might find that doesn’t make sense.

But tonight, with Adam sleeping peacefully beside me and my mind spinning in circles, I need something else to focus on.

I scroll to the beginning and start reading.

At first, it feels like discovering someone else’s work.

The words are mine, but they feel foreign, dreamlike, as if I’m reading them through frosted glass.

I don’t remember writing most of it, which isn’t entirely surprising.

Those last months of pregnancy were a blur of swollen feet and heartburn and the constant pressure of a tiny person pressing against my ribs.

The story follows a woman named Lena who moves to a quiet neighborhood after a loss she refuses to name.

She keeps a small notebook where she records ordinary things that don’t quite feel ordinary: a porch light that burns at noon, a Welcome Home balloon that never deflates, a lullaby drifting from the wrong window.

At first, she isn’t stalking anyone. She’s cataloging.

From her kitchen sink, Lena watches the woman across the street and the new baby she carries through the day like a fragile appointment. Lena tells herself it’s research, a study in domestic routine. Still, things get strange.

I keep reading. Lena shadows her doubts more than any person.

She times the neighborhood’s walks, notes the days the stroller doesn’t appear, the afternoons when the wind chimes stop ringing even though the wind keeps blowing.

The details loop until they start to look like evidence, and she can’t tell whether she’s building a case or going crazy.

My chest tightens, even though none of it is literal. No hospitals, no paperwork. Just the ache of someone trying to name what won’t stand still.

I click the revision history. The file shows it was created on February 11. Last modified on April 9. Months before Eva was born. Before any of this. I stare at the dates until the numbers blur. I remember complaining to Adam that my fingers were too swollen to type.

I scroll further. The narrative frays as it goes on, but the voice sharpens.

Lena starts walking a loop that isn’t hers: past the schoolyard at dawn, around the small park by the river, along the block where the houses all look the same until they don’t.

She writes down things that feel wrong because she doesn’t know what else to do with them.

The notebook becomes a ledger of tiny misalignments.

I pause, palm pressed to my sternum. It’s not my life. But it feels like I’m looking in a distorted mirror.

I should close the laptop, but I don’t. Instead, I open a new scene in Chapter 7. The cursor blinks. My fingers move before I even know what I’m going to say.

Lena waits on a bench near the river when the fog is still clinging low, the grass slick and cold through her jeans.

Runners pass in pairs. A dog shakes water onto her shoes and trots away.

Across the path, under the bare branches of a sycamore, two adults sit at a picnic table.

They don ’ t touch. They don ’ t smile. A small object changes hands.

It’s something that glints once in the weak light, small enough to disappear into a pocket.

The woman glances toward the playground and tucks the object into a diaper bag patterned with tiny half-moons.

The man leaves first, walking like someone who wants to be anywhere else.

The wind chimes on the park restrooms rattle and then go quiet.

I stop. The words look like they wrote themselves while I watched. Not a prophecy. Not proof. Just specificity that feels borrowed from my own life.

Eva’s cry crackles through the monitor, sharp and urgent. The green light pulses. I should get up. My legs don’t move.

I scroll back up, skimming what I’ve just written. None of it names anything I’m afraid to name. No matching numbers. No pink anything. Just a woman who keeps a record because it’s the only control she has left.

I look up at our ceiling, at the water stain Adam keeps promising to fix. Then back to the line in Lena’s margin I can’t stop seeing: The Wrong Room.

This isn’t just a book.