chapter 10
A week later, I went into labor.
It happened suddenly.
One moment I was making tea in the residence kitchen.
The next, I was on the floor, breathless, one hand gripping the edge of the counter while pain tore through me.
The residence manager rushed me to the hospital.
The contractions came hard and fast. Hours blurred together in a haze of pain, white lights, and voices I barely heard.
But through it all, I kept whispering the same name.
“Lila.”
Again and again.
“Lila.”
Then, like the sky splitting after a storm, she arrived.
Tiny.
Red-faced.
Furious.
She screamed the moment she entered the world, as if she already knew she had every right to take up space in it.
And I cried.
I held her against my chest and sobbed into her damp hair.
“You’re safe,” I whispered. “You’re safe now.”
The nurses were kind.
The room was warm.
Sunlight spilled through the hospital window in pale gold.
I stared at her little fingers, her fluttering eyelids, the shape of her mouth as she breathed.
And in that moment, nothing else mattered.
Not Jake.
Not Ethan.
Not how she had come to be.
She was mine.
And I was hers.
No twin, no lie, no obsession could change that truth.
Later that afternoon, a nurse brought an envelope into my room.
“There was no postage,” she said. “Someone must have dropped it off.”
My name was handwritten on the front.
Inside was a photo of Lila.
Taken from outside the hospital window.
Beneath it was a note.
She has your eyes. I won’t come closer. I just needed to see her once.
There was no signature.
There didn’t need to be.
I knew.
I stared at the note for a very long time.
Then I tore it into pieces, walked into the bathroom, flushed them down the toilet, and held my daughter a little tighter when I came back.
Maybe Ethan had loved me in whatever broken way he understood love.
But love without honesty is not love.
Love without respect is not love.
Love that follows, deceives, watches, and waits in shadows is not love.
It is control.
And I would never let it touch my daughter.
Not once.
Not ever.