Chapter 6: The Other Mother
The test was ordered at 1:17 in the morning.
Paula walked me through the process — a simple cheek swab, non-invasive, results within hours given the circumstances.
She was matter-of-fact about it, which I was grateful for.
I didn't need sympathy right then.
I needed information.
Owen didn't come back that night.
My mom stayed.
She slept in the recliner beside the window with her coat pulled over her like a blanket, and sometime around three in the morning she reached over and held my hand without saying anything, and I let her.
At 6:40 a.m., a different doctor came in.
Young, careful with his words.
He confirmed what I already knew in some part of myself — the baby in the bassinet was mine.
The DNA was conclusive.
My son.
Biologically, without question, mine.
I cried.
Not from relief exactly.
From something more complicated than that.
At 8:15, a woman knocked on my open door.
She was my age, maybe a year or two younger.
Dark circles under her eyes.
A hospital bracelet still on her wrist.
She was holding a baby — a boy, wrapped in a white blanket with yellow ducks.
"I'm sorry to come without calling," she said.
"I'm Diane Mercer."
I looked at her for a moment.
"Come in."
She sat in the chair Owen had used.
She held her son against her chest and looked at me with the particular exhaustion of someone who had also not slept.
"They told me what happened," she said.
"Paula told me this morning."
"How are you?" I asked.
It was a strange question given everything, but it was the one that came out.
"Honestly?" Diane said.
"I'm furious.
And I'm relieved.
And I don't know what to do with either of those things yet."
"Same," I said.
She looked at the bassinet.
"Is he—"
"Mine.
Yes.
Confirmed this morning."
She exhaled.
"Good." She looked down at her own son.
"Mine too.
Paula checked both records again."
We sat with that for a moment.
Two women in hospital rooms who had never met, connected by forty minutes of administrative chaos and whatever their husbands had decided to do about it.
"Daniel told me Owen asked the nurse to suppress the report," Diane said.
"He told me this morning, when I pushed him." She looked up.
"Did Owen tell you that himself?"
"The nurse told me."
Diane nodded.
"Daniel didn't ask her to suppress it.
I want you to know that.
He was angry about the mix-up, but he didn't ask for it to be hidden." She paused.
"But he also didn't stop Owen from asking.
And he didn't tell me.
So." She shrugged, a small, tired movement.
"We're having our own conversation."
"Did Daniel say why Owen wanted it hidden?"
Diane was quiet for a moment.
Her son made a small sound and she shifted him gently.
"They knew each other," she said.
"Before.
Owen and Daniel.
I didn't know that until this morning." She met my eyes.
"Did you?"
"No."
"Daniel says it was a long time ago.
That they lost touch." She paused.
"But he also said that when Owen recognized him in the hallway, Owen went very pale.
And that Owen said — and this is what Daniel told me word for word — Owen said, *This cannot get out.
Do you understand me?
This cannot get out.*"
I stared at her.
"Not 'this is embarrassing' or 'this will frighten our wives,'" Diane said quietly.
"This cannot get out." She looked at me steadily.
"That's a different kind of sentence."
The baby in my arms had fallen back to sleep.
I looked down at his face — his small, certain, undeniable face — and felt the ground shift beneath everything I thought I understood about the last nine months.
"Do you know what they have in common?" I asked.
"Owen and Daniel.
From before."
Diane reached into the pocket of her robe and set a folded piece of paper on the edge of my bed.
"I found this in Daniel's jacket this morning," she said.
May you like
"I don't know what it means.
But I think you might."
