Chapter 6 - My Mother’s Secret
My mother lived an hour away in a small yellow house with wind chimes on the porch and six different kinds of tea in the kitchen.
When I arrived the next morning with Maya, Helen Collins already looked guilty.
That scared me.
“Mom, what did you tell Lorraine?”
She pressed both hands around a coffee mug. “I thought I was helping.”
The sentence was becoming a curse in my life.
“What did you tell her?”
Helen started crying.
Five years earlier, after my miscarriage, I had called her from a grocery-store parking lot because I could not stop shaking. I told her I felt like my body had betrayed me. I told her I was scared I would never be a mother.
Helen had kept notes for my therapist because I was too overwhelmed to remember appointments.
Two months ago, Lorraine came to her saying Ethan was worried I was “spiraling again.”
“She said they needed a history for the doctor,” Mom whispered. “I gave her the old notebook.”
I stood so fast the chair scraped backward.
“You gave her my private journal?”
“I gave her my notes, not yours.”
“She used them to say I’m dangerous.”
“I didn’t know.”
Maya asked, “Did you verify Rachel’s identity for the hospital?”
Helen shook her head violently. “No.”
“Did you sign anything?”
“No.”
She ran to a drawer and brought back a folder. Inside was an envelope Lorraine had left behind.
It contained a typed summary of my miscarriage, edited to sound like a psychiatric crisis.
At the bottom, somebody had written my mother’s name.
Not her signature. Just her printed name.
Maya photographed everything.
Then Helen said, “There’s something else.”
She pulled out an old phone.
“Ethan called me three weeks ago. I didn’t answer. He left a voicemail.”
I pressed play.
My husband’s voice filled the kitchen.
Helen, I need you to cooperate with my mother. Rachel is getting suspicious, and if she thinks we’re trying to control her, she may run. We need her to look unstable before the baby comes, or the judge won’t take us seriously.
The room went silent.
I could hear my own breathing.
Maya said, “That’s not ambiguous.”
No.
It was not.
I called Ethan.
He answered immediately.
“Rachel, please.”
“I heard the voicemail.”
Silence.
“You said you didn’t know.”
“I didn’t know what she planned to do with it.”
“You said, ‘We need her to look unstable.’”
He started crying.
“I was trying to keep you from leaving.”
My anger went still.
“Why would I leave?”
He did not answer.
Then he whispered, “Because I knew what you’d find if you looked at the trust accounts.”
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