Chapter 10 - THE PERSON WHO FIRST SUGGESTED REBECCA WAS METhe major twist was in an email I wrote four months earlier.
Aaron had been dead twelve days.
I was still pregnant.
Rebecca had stayed at my house for almost a week.
She cooked.
Drove me to appointments.
Slept in the guest room because I woke screaming some nights.
I emailed my estate attorney:
If something happens during delivery, I want Rebecca to raise Lily. Nobody will love her more.
I had forgotten the exact wording.
Nobody will love her more.
Rebecca had not.
She printed it.
It appeared among the documents she gave her attorney when asking about temporary guardianship.
Legally, it proved almost nothing about my current fitness.
Emotionally, it explained a great deal.
Rebecca believed I had once recognized her as Lily’s second mother.
That was not what I meant.
I meant:
If I die, the person who held me through Aaron’s funeral should hold our child.
Then I lived.
And circumstances changed.
Rebecca did not adjust.
Three earlier clues shifted.
Her possessiveness during the newborn weeks.
Her anger when I said I was moving home.
Her belief that caring for Lily should “count.”
She had been living inside an emergency role I once invited her to imagine.
Then Helen fed it.
“You’re the one Margaret trusted.”
“You already know Lily better than anyone.”
“She needs stability.”
Together they converted a contingency plan into a claim.
That was the twist.
Not that Rebecca secretly plotted from the beginning.
I gave her a place in Lily’s hypothetical future when I was terrified I might die.
She later tried to occupy that place while I was alive.
My words helped explain how she got there.
They did not authorize it.
I told Rebecca during another meeting:
“I meant it when I wrote that.”
She started crying.
“I know.”
“You would have been who I wanted if I died.”
She covered her face.
“But I didn’t die.”
“No.”
“And you weren’t supposed to become Lily’s mother because my life became inconvenient.”
“I know.”
Then she looked at me.
“Do you hate me?”
I thought about the shove.
The affidavit.
The fire pit.
Her hand holding Lily at three in the morning so I could sleep.
The nursery she built after Aaron died because I could not assemble furniture without crying.
“No.”
That seemed to hurt her more.
“I don’t trust you.”
There.
The more useful answer.
Hatred does not determine access.
May you like
Trust does.
And Rebecca had spent the last six weeks behaving as though love should substitute for it.
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