I looked down at the baby. Emerson. No—Matthew. He was sleeping peacefully, his tiny lungs rising and falling with a rhythm I had prayed for every night for three months. The cruelty of it was a physical weight. While I was picking out a tiny casket, Claire was picking out nursery curtains. While I was screaming into my pillow at 3:00 a.m., she was holding my son.
“Where is the doctor?” I demanded, my voice gaining a terrifying coldness.
Mark looked up, his face a roadmap of guilt and terror. “He’s gone. He left the country the day after Claire… the day after she died. He knew the paper trail was messy. He knew if anything happened to Claire, the whole thing would collapse.”
“And Claire? Did she die because of the guilt? Or did the universe finally decide to balance the scales?”
Mark flinched. “Pulmonary embolism. It was fast. The nurses… they thought it was karma. Even her own mother knew something was wrong. She saw the way Claire looked at that baby—not with love, but with a kind of desperate ownership. When Claire died, her mother found the original records. She told me to take the baby and disappear. She didn’t want a ‘stolen’ grandchild.”
I stood up. My legs felt like lead, but my mind was a lightning storm. “Get out.”
“Andrea, please—”
“Get. Out.” I gripped the baby tighter. “If you touch him, if you even look at him, I will call the police, the FBI, and every news station in Colorado. You are a kidnapper, Mark. You are an accomplice to the most disgusting crime a human being can commit.”
“He needs a father,” Mark pleaded, a pathetic attempt at leverage.
“He had a father,” I spat. “A father who left me because I cried too much for the son you stole. Robert is gone because of what you did. My life is a ruin because of what you did. You are not his father. You are just the man who helped a thief hide her prize.”
Mark saw the fire in my eyes—a mother’s rage that transcends law and reason. He backed away, his hands raised in surrender. He left the diaper bag. He left the pink folder. He left the only thing that had given his life meaning for the last three days. When the door clicked shut, I collapsed.
I didn’t scream. I didn’t have the breath for it. I just held Matthew and rocked.
