Page 78 of Wicked Nightmare

I picked it up. Janine's face stared back at me, younger, maybe early forties, holding a newborn wrapped in a pink blanket. The baby had a tuft of blonde hair and its eyes were closed, its mouth a tiny pink bow. Janine was smiling, but it wasn't a warm smile. It was the smile of someone holding a prize. A trophy. A product.

I turned the frame over. On the back, in pencil, someone had written a date and there was a small photo of Lillianna tucked into the frame. The date was one that lived in the black hole of my memory, somewhere between St. Agnes and the SINNERS blackout.

My hands went cold as I grabbed the loose photo and shoved it in my pocket.

I set the frame down and kept searching. I rifled through drawers, flipped through old mail, searching for anything that might explain the gaping holes in my memory. Nothing. Fucking nothing.

My frustration mounted with each empty cupboard and barren shelf. Where were the answers I needed? The clock was ticking, and I could feel the urgency increasing.

"Lakey," Cam's low voice startled me. He appeared in the doorway, “Nothing upstairs, let’s check the study.”

I followed him, my skin prickling. The study was a mess of papers and overturned furniture. Cam pointed to an open drawer, barely visible behind a fallen bookshelf.

"Check there, I’m gonna check the computer.”

I peered inside. My breath caught in my throat. Adoption records. My hands trembled as I lifted the papers, scanning the dates. They aligned perfectly with the blank spaces in my mind, the lost time I'd never been able to recover.

Mother: Lakey Aldrich. Age at birth: approximately 16. Circumstances: medically induced labor under supervision of Dr. C. Olson. Outcome: live female infant, 5 lbs 2 oz.

The room tilted. My vision narrowed to a pinhole. The words swam and reformed and swam again, but they didn't change. They said what they said. Mother: Lakey Aldrich.

I'd had a baby.

I'd had a baby and I didn't remember it. They'd put me under, or drugged me, or done whatever they'd done with all those drugs, and they'd taken a baby out of my body and I didn't remember it. The chemical castration hadn't been first. The baby had been first. They'd taken her, and then they'd made sure I could never make another one.

"Holy shit," I whispered, my voice cracking.

“What?”

I made up my mind. I couldn’t tell Cam about this. Not right now. I needed to figure out what it all meant first. Was she his? If not… what happens to us? He’s not going to fight for a kid fathered by a rapist.

Fuck. “Uhhh, nothing.” I shoved the papers in my jacket.

Cam shrugged and finished on the computer until a loud repetitive beep startled us.

"We need to get out of here," he said. "Now." He pointed to the top right corner of the ceiling, a red light blinking obnoxiously at us.

So, it was a set-up.

I nodded, numb, clutching the papers to my chest under my jacket. Whatever these records meant, whatever twisted truth they held, one thing was for certain: nothing would ever be the same again.

Cam led me out of the study and back down the hall. The sound of multiple cars racing down the street should have alerted me something was about to happen, but I couldn't think, could barely move through the haze that had descended on my mind.

The little girl. Lillianna. The one I'd been watching for seven years from a tree across the street. The one whose pink curtains I'd memorized. The one whose name I'd just learned a few days ago and rolled around in my mouth like candy.

Mine. She was mine.

Not Janine's foster kid. Not some random child I'd developed an inexplicable attachment to. Mine. My body had made her. My body had carried her. And they'd taken her out of me while I was unconscious and handed her to the woman who'd abused me as a child, and I'd spent seven years watching her through a window without knowing why.

The pull. The need. The way I couldn't let her go, couldn't stop watching, couldn't explain it to Cam or to myself. It wasn't obsession. It wasn't trauma response. It was instinct. The most basic, primal instinct a human can have, buried under drugs and blackouts and years of gaslighting, but still there. Still pulling me to that tree every night.

My body had known. Even when my brain couldn't remember, my body had known she was mine.

"I don't... I can't..." I stammered, my eyes darting wildly around the house. "Cam, what if she's... what if I..."

My throat closed up, choking on words I couldn't bring myself to say. If I said it out loud, it became real, and if it became real, I'd have to face the fact that I'd spent seven years watching my daughter through a window instead of kicking down the door and taking her home.

Cam's hand gripped my shoulder. "Lakey, focus. She’s not here, I checked upstairs," he said, his eyes boring into mine. "We can't stay here. We need to move. Now."