Mom Cooked Only for Bella, So I Found My Real Mother novel · Chapter 11 of 24

Chapter 11: The Nursery

Nobody in the hall moved.

Mom stood behind the pie table with both hands flat on the cloth, and the words kept coming, hoarse and fast.

"I was a nurse on the ward that night. I was nine months along and my water broke on shift."

"Brenda," the pastor said gently from the front row.

"Let me say it." She didn't look at him. "I delivered at eleven-oh-five. A girl. Perfect. And she never took a breath."

A low, wet sound came from a woman near the door.

"They took her to the side room. Donald was out in the waiting room asleep. I lay there for two hours."

Her eyes were fixed on the middle of the room, on nobody.

"At one in the morning I got up. I walked down the hall in my gown. The nursery was short-staffed, and the night nurse was my friend, and she was in the break room."

My stomach turned over.

"There was a baby in the third bassinet, red-haired, screaming and healthy. The card said Landry."

Beside me Odette made no sound at all.

"I stood over her for a long time," Mom said. "I told myself I was only looking."

"And?" I said.

She turned her head and finally looked at me.

"Then I did what I did."

"Say it."

"I put my dead daughter in that bassinet, under that name, and I took you."

The hall exploded.

Chairs scraped. Women cried out. A man at the back shouted, "Good Lord."

A little girl asked her mother what was happening and was shushed with a hand over her mouth.

Odette's fingers closed hard around my arm.

I felt her shaking from her shoulder to her wrist.

"You put her in," Odette said.

It was the first thing she had said since we walked in.

Everyone heard it, and the hall went still again.

"You gave me a body that was not mine."

"Yes," Mom said.

"I buried her. I stood at the grave. My husband signed for the little box and carried it. He put flowers on it two Augusts, and then he died. I have put flowers on it every August since, for eighteen years."

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