Page 21 of The Other Mother

M

I t's past midnight, and I'm sitting in the kitchen with my laptop open.

Eva is finally asleep after another evening of inconsolable crying.

Adam went to bed hours ago, muttering something about an early morning conference call with investors.

He's been doing that more lately, disappearing into work, into golf.

The Mara confrontation from this afternoon won’t leave me alone.

Her words keep playing on repeat: You took everything from me.

You don ’ t even know what you did. Every time I close my eyes, I see her hollow face, the way she looked at me with such certainty, like she knew something about my life that I didn’t.

I try to look up Janet. Just to ease my mind. But I can’t find anything. No last name. No credentials on the wellness center’s site. No therapist license. Not even a LinkedIn. The deeper I dig, the more it feels like she doesn’t exist .

Earlier this week, Adam brought home the support group’s anonymous binder. It’s one of those spiral notebooks where moms write messages to the next mom. The first line on the page he pointed to read: The baby cried and then it stopped. They told me to rest. I can ’ t rest.

Adam watched my face while I read, like he was waiting for the words to fix me. “See?” he said softly. “You’re not alone.”

I told him it helped. I closed the binder and pretended I felt steadier.

But the handwriting clung to me after he went upstairs.

Familiar loops. The same hard-leaning slant, like the writer was bracing for something.

Janet leaves the binder on the check-in table.

Anyone can write in it. Anyone can read it.

And there’s something else nagging at me, a fragment that keeps slipping. In those last months when I couldn’t sleep, I lived online: message boards, support groups, late-night DMs with other expectant moms.

I pull up Gmail and type birth plan. Too many newsletters. I try template, then guardianship. Nothing. I open the Trash and search again.

A thread pops up I don’t remember archiving.

Subject : “Birth Plan Options.”

Sender : M. Benton (Community Moderator)

My stomach tightens as I click.

Hi Claire,

I ’ ve attached a standard temporary caregiver/guardianship authorization a lot of moms keep in their hospital bag (just in case).

This is for a grandparent/sister to sign school or ER papers if mom is sedated or dad is traveling.

If you want to talk to someone before you deliver, I can point you to a low-cost legal clinic.

Looking forward,

Mae Benton

Community Moderator

The tone isn’t personal, it’s more matter-of-fact and helpful. It’s the same calm voice from the pregnancy board. She’s a peer mentor, not a friend.

I scroll.

Claire,

Just checking in. The hospital ’ s emergency consent protocol is pretty standard, and that postnatal recovery/bonding window note should answer your timing questions. Let me know if anything feels unclear.

And:

Per your message, I uploaded sample forms for reference. Edit or ignore—use whatever helps.

There’s an attachment. A little Drive icon with a filename: birth_plan_resources.pdf. When the preview flickers open, a header flashes for a second before the screen errors out :

I, Claire Matthews, authorize…

Error : “Corrupt File. Unable to retrieve.”

I try again. For half a breath the Drive viewer loads and I catch a line in the banner I wish I hadn’t: Last modified: Sept 3, 12:14 A.M.

The night I delivered.

Error again. “File moved or deleted.”

My hands are shaking so hard I can barely work the trackpad. I refresh. I download. Nothing. It’s like it was there and then it wasn’t, a ghost file with my name on it and a timestamp that shouldn’t exist.

I hear a noise coming from the monitor. I freeze, listening. Eva shifts, sighs, settles. She's sleeping peacefully, her tiny chest rising and falling evenly. She looks so innocent, so perfect, that for a moment I can almost convince myself this is all some kind of mistake .

I watch the green light slow again and reread the thread. None of it says what I’m afraid it says. There are no loaded phrases. No secret deals. Just a cautious woman on the internet sending templates to nervous mothers to tuck into their hospital bags.

So why does it feel like a missing piece?

I back out of Gmail and push away from the table.

I need something that isn’t a screen, something normal to ground me in the present.

I step into the backyard barefoot. When we first moved here, I'd been determined to grow something green, something that would remind me of the life we'd left behind in Orange County.

I'd researched desert gardening obsessively, ordered special soil amendments, bought seeds for plants that were supposed to thrive in heat and drought.

Now, months later, my little raised bed behind the house looks like a graveyard. The tomatoes I'd planted with such hope had withered despite the drip irrigation system Adam installed. The herbs I'd been so excited about, basil and cilantro and mint, had turned brown and crispy within weeks.

The only things thriving are the succulents I'd planted as an afterthought.

Jade plants and barrel cacti and something called ghost plant that spreads like a silver-green carpet across the gravel.

They don't need me, don't require the constant attention and worry that everything else in my life seems to demand.

I sit on the edge of the raised bed in my pajamas, pulling weeds by moonlight.

The desert air is finally cool, carrying the scent of creosote and that indefinable smell of emptiness that I'm still not used to.

In the distance, coyotes yip and howl, a sound that used to terrify me but is now starting to feel like home.

Adam finds me there twenty minutes later.

"Claire?" His voice is soft, careful. "What are you doing out here?"

I don't look up from the weeds I'm methodically destroying. "I couldn't sleep."

He sits beside me on the wooden edge of the bed, close enough that I can smell his soap and the faint scent of the bourbon he sometimes drinks when he thinks I'm not paying attention. "You've been having a lot of trouble sleeping lately."

"So have you." It comes out sharper than I intended.

He's quiet for a moment. When he speaks again, his voice has that therapist-approved tone he's been using with me more and more. "I'm worried about you. This thing with the support group ... maybe it's time to talk to someone. A professional."

"You think I'm crazy."

"I think you're struggling. There's a difference."

I finally look at him. In the moonlight, his face is all sharp angles and shadows, but his eyes are kind.

This is the man I fell in love with, the one who brought me coffee in bed during my mother's chemo treatments, who held me when I told him about losing Marcus's baby all those years ago, who promised me that Eva would be the fresh start we both needed.

"Do you remember much about when Eva was born?" I ask.

He shifts beside me. "What do you mean?"

"I mean the details. The timeline. Who was there, what happened when."

"Claire ... "

"Because I don't. Not really. It's all so fuzzy, like I was watching it happen to someone else."

Adam reaches over and takes my dirt-covered hand in his. "You were in labor for forty hours and then you were under with the emergency c-section. You were exhausted. It's normal not to remember everything clearly."

"But you remember?"

"I remember enough."

There's something in the way he says it that makes me pull my hand away. Something careful and practiced, like he's rehearsed this conversation before.

"I found emails," I tell him. "From before Eva was born. From that woman, Mae. We were talking about legal documents, about donor agreements."

Adam goes very still. "What emails?"

"I don't know. They don't make sense. But it sounds like we were planning something together. Like I agreed to something I can't remember. "

"You were pregnant. You were probably looking into all kinds of things—birth plans, custody arrangements if something happened to us. It doesn't mean anything."

His response is too quick, too reasonable. Like he's been expecting this conversation.

I stand up abruptly, brushing dirt off my pajama pants. "I'm going back inside."

"Claire, wait."

But I'm already walking away, leaving him sitting alone in my failed garden.

Back in the kitchen, I open my laptop again. I look for anything that might jog my memory. Near the bottom, I find a note titled "Names we're not using." It's a long list of traditional names, trendy names, family names that carried too much baggage.

Near the bottom, circled and then crossed out in red: Evelyn Gracie .

I don’t remember changing my mind. I remember loving it. Or thinking I did.

Back in the kitchen, I open my laptop again. I search “birth plan,” then “guardianship,” and “template.”

I go back to the email thread, reading every word again. The timestamps say the emails were created six months ago, in my second trimester. They were deleted two weeks after Eva was born, right around the time my memory gets fuzzy.

I stare at the screen until my eyes burn. Then, almost without thinking, I restore the thread to my inbox and create a new folder.

I name it " M – PRIVATE .”

I tell myself it’s just for safekeeping and don’t believe that myself.