Page 27 of The Other Mother

THIS IS MY BLANKET

T he morning starts with Adam bringing me coffee in bed.

He sits on the edge of the mattress, still wearing yesterday's golf shirt, and watches me take the first sip. The coffee is perfect. Two sugars, splash of cream, just the way I like it. He hasn’t brought up taking Eva to his mom’s again and, for that, I’m grateful.

As far as he’s concerned, everything is fine, or as fine as it can be.

"You were up late again," he says, not accusingly, just stating a fact.

I was. I'd been sitting in the nursery until three in the morning, watching Eva sleep, trying to memorize the curve of her ear, the way her tiny fist curls near her cheek. The things a mother should know by heart.

"I couldn't sleep."

He nods, runs his hand through his hair. There are new lines around his eyes, stress lines that weren't there two months ago. "Claire, I've been thinking. Maybe we should take a weekend trip. Just the three of us. Get out of the desert for a while.”

The offer surprises me. Adam hasn’t suggested anything like that since we moved here.

He’s been swallowed by the Rancho Vista commission, a net-zero “desert refuge” for a VC couple fleeing LA; rammed-earth walls, a graywater loop, glass that tints when the sun hits.

He calls it a sanctuary. I call it a hideout.

The irony isn’t lost on me that he builds escape hatches for strangers while I feel trapped in this life.

"Where would we go?"

"The coast. Maybe Carmel. Remember our anniversary trip there, before ... " He gestures vaguely toward the nursery. Before Eva. Before everything changed.

I do remember. We'd stayed at that tiny bed and breakfast with the garden full of succulents and morning glory vines. I'd dragged him to three different bookstores, and he'd insisted on buying me that leather journal I'd been eyeing. The one I still haven't written in.

"You'd take time off work?"

He laughs, but it sounds forced. "For you? Yeah. I think we need it."

There's something careful in his voice, like he's handling me. Like I'm fragile. Maybe I am.

"Let me think about it," I tell him, and he kisses my forehead before heading to the shower.

After he leaves for work, I take Eva out to the back patio. The October morning is crisp. The sky is that particular shade of blue that only happens here, so clear it almost hurts to look at.

I settle Eva in her bouncy seat and kneel beside the raised bed Adam built for me. The rosemary I planted last month has brown edges, and the basil looks scorched despite the shade cloth. Only the desert sage seems happy, spreading its silvery leaves like it belongs here.

"We're not desert people, are we, baby girl?" I murmur to Eva, who's watching a hummingbird dart between the barrel cactus Adam insisted would be low-maintenance.

I pull a few weeds, the kind with thorns that grab at your skin and don't let go.

My hands are already rough from the dry air, nothing like they used to be when I worked at the publishing house.

Back then, I got manicures every two weeks, kept my nails short and neat for typing.

I wore nice outfits to work. I was professional and put together.

Now I can't remember the last time I looked in a mirror for longer than it takes to brush my teeth.

The thought reminds me of something my mother used to say when I was little and complained about moving from Ohio to California: "Home isn't about the place, Claire-bear.

It's about the people you love and who love you back.

" She'd been trying to comfort me, but even at eight years old, I'd wondered what happened when you weren't sure about the loving part anymore .

Eva makes a soft cooing sound, and I look up to find her staring at me with those dark eyes. She's beautiful. Perfect. And the longer I look at her, the more that familiar unease creeps up my spine, the feeling that something fundamental is missing between us.

I pick her up and hold her close, breathing in that sweet baby smell. "I love you," I whisper into her hair. "You know that, right?"

She doesn't respond, of course. But there's something in her stillness that feels like a question I can't answer.

By afternoon, I'm parked outside the Desert Springs Wellness Center where the support group meets, but I don't go inside.

I can't face the circle of chairs, the careful smiles, the way everyone pretends we're all just tired new mothers dealing with normal postpartum stuff.

Instead, I sit in my car under a palo verde tree, watching the shadows lengthen across the parking lot.

I open the wellness center’s site and start clicking anything that looks official. In the footer there’s a tiny link: Group Intake Form (PDF). I tap it open. At the bottom, I see:

Facilitator: J. Alvarado, LMFT #98678

I copy the number and open a new tab to pull up the California Board of Behavioral Sciences license lookup. I paste the number into the search field.

Result: Morales, Janet - LMFT #98678 — Active .

The business address matches Desert Springs Wellness Center. The headshot is older, but it’s her—the same face as the staff photo taped to the check-in desk.

I tap through: license active. No discipline.

A quick search on both names, “Janet Morales” and “Janet Alvarado,” pulls up an old local piece about a former patient who wouldn’t leave her alone. There’s a restraining order on file.

So she keeps the license under her maiden name and uses Alvarado at the center. Privacy, not conspiracy.

Heat pricks my cheeks. Janet isn’t my monster.

Not today.

The meeting ends at three thirty. I know because I've been watching the door, waiting.

Women trickle out in ones and twos, clutching their purses and water bottles, most of them looking like they'd rather be anywhere else.

Vanessa appears, the chatty one who always asks how everyone is sleeping.

She glances around the parking lot like she's looking for someone, then gets into her white SUV and drives away.

Mara is the last to leave.

She emerges slowly, clutching a faded denim jacket around her thin frame. Even from a distance, I can see how much weight she's lost since that first meeting. Her cheekbones are sharp now, her eyes hollow. She looks like someone who's been carved away from the inside.

She sees me immediately. Doesn't seem surprised.

I get out of my car and walk toward her, my heart hammering against my ribs. She doesn't run. Doesn't yell. Just stands there waiting, like she's been expecting this moment.

"What do you want?" Her voice is flat, empty of emotion.

“I need to know what happened. Please.”

We stare at each other across the parking lot. A dust devil spins lazily between the cars, picking up scraps of paper and dead leaves. The air smells like creosote and car exhaust.

“Then follow me,” she says finally.

We walk around the corner of the building, past a dumpster and into a small courtyard with concrete benches and struggling oleander bushes. It’s private here, shielded from the street by a cinderblock wall painted the color of sand.

Mara sits on one of the benches and pulls a worn canvas tote into her lap. Her hands shake as she reaches inside.

“You said you didn’t remember. Maybe this will help.”

She pulls out a folded photo, creased from handling. The paper feels soft between my fingers.

It’s grainy, clearly printed from a phone, but the image is unmistakable, a hospital bassinet with metal rails, a swaddled newborn with a shock of dark hair, and draped over the baby’s body, a pink blanket with an intricate rosebud pattern embroidered along the edge.

My breath catches.

It’s my blanket. The one my mother spent months working on during her final chemo treatments, her fingers moving the needle even when the drugs made her hands shake. She pressed it into my hands the week before she died.

"For when you have a daughter," she'd whispered. "So she'll always have something from her grandmother who loved her before she was even born."

I'd packed it carefully in my hospital bag, imagining the moment I'd wrap my baby in it for the first time. But in all the chaos of the delivery, the emergency C-section, the long recovery, I'd forgotten about it entirely.

“That’s mine,” I whisper. “It was in my room. In my bag.”

Mara swallows. “Then someone took it.” Her gaze goes distant, like she’s replaying the night. “Before dawn they rolled a bassinet past my door. That blanket was draped over the baby. She was mine, but that blanket wasn’t. I’d never seen anything like it.”

“They didn’t even tell me,” she continues, voice tightening. “They just took her. Said something went wrong, that she wasn’t breathing. Shoved forms at me while I was still bleeding, still numb from the epidural.”

She stands abruptly and paces the small space. “But I kept hearing crying down the hall. All night. A baby crying, and I knew it was her. A mother knows.”

I think of all those nights I’ve stood in Eva’s nursery, waiting for a certainty that never arrived.

“And then the next morning,” Mara says, turning back to me, “I saw you. Walking out of the hospital with my baby in your arms, wrapped in your embroidered blanket like she’d always been yours.”

“So, where is my baby then?” I ask.

“I don’t know.”

I can’t breathe. The desert air feels too thin, too hot. I remember leaving the hospital. Adam carried the car seat while I walked slowly beside him, my incision pulling with each step. I remember feeling disconnected, like I was watching someone else live my life.

“I didn’t know,” I say, but even to me it sounds hollow. “I swear to you, I didn’t know.”

“But you do now.”

The photo trembles in my hands. Fragments click into place like snapped bones, the sedative burning in my arm and a nurse with red-painted nails murmuring, “She doesn’t look like you, does she?” The way Adam deflected every question, insisting I just needed rest. A pattern I didn’t want to see.

“They used me,” I whisper.

Mara’s face softens a fraction. “ They used both of us.”

We stand in silence, the desert buzzing faintly and then going still. Somewhere in the oleanders, a cicada starts up, then cuts off, leaving only our breathing.

I try to hand the photo back, but my hands won’t let go. It’s proof. The blanket my dying mother made, wrapped around a baby who isn’t mine, cradled in arms that should have been Mara’s.

“Can I keep it?” I ask.

Mara doesn’t answer. She lifts her bag and walks away, leaving me alone in the courtyard with the photo pressed to my chest.

As she disappears around the corner, one thought cuts through me, if Eva isn’t mine… is she Mara’s? They told Mara her baby died. If that were another lie, then whose baby am I raising?

And where is my child?