Chapter 6
Lily Marie Carter was born at 2:17 in the morning.
She was small—five pounds, two ounces—but perfect.
Ten fingers.
Ten toes.
The loudest, fiercest cry I had ever heard.
They wheeled her into my arms, and the moment I held her, every fear, every pain, every sleepless night of the past months vanished.
She was real.
She was ours.
And nothing and no one would ever take her from me.
Ryan held her next, his hands trembling so badly the nurse had to help him support her head.
He cried as he looked down at her.
“I will never let anyone hurt you,” he whispered to her. “Never. Not even my own mother.”
The first forty-eight hours in the hospital were perfect.
My parents flew in from out of state to meet their first grandchild.
Thomas and Linda came, too—Thomas holding Lily like she was the most precious thing in the world, crying when she wrapped her tiny hand around his finger.
Ryan’s lawyer stopped by with the final preparations for the hearing.
We had Thomas’s testimony.
We had the journal.
We had the boxes of evidence.
We had the police reports and the restraining order and the proof that Diane had filed false CPS reports.
It was an airtight case.
Or so we thought.
On the third day, Diane showed up.
She didn’t come alone.
She brought two lawyers with her, both wearing suits that probably cost more than our car.
The nurses tried to stop her at the nurses’ station.
She ignored them and walked straight to my room, the lawyers trailing behind her like bodyguards.
Ryan was out in the hallway getting coffee.
I was alone with Lily, who was sleeping in the plastic bassinet beside my bed.
Diane pushed the door open and stood in the doorway.
She looked radiant.
Her hair was done, her makeup perfect, her dress expensive and flattering.
She looked like a woman who had already won.
“Get out,” I said, reaching for the call button.
“Before you do that,” Diane said calmly, “you might want to hear what I have to say. It concerns your daughter’s future.”
She walked to the bassinet and looked down at Lily.
A strange expression crossed her face.
For a split second, I thought I saw something almost human in her eyes.
Longing.
Regret.
It was gone so fast I thought I had imagined it.
“She’s beautiful,” Diane said. “Looks just like Ryan did when he was a baby.”
“Get away from her.”
Diane turned to face me.
The cold mask was back.
“I’ve filed an emergency motion,” she said. “Given that the child has been born prematurely and requires specialized care, I’m arguing that the hospital discharge should be delayed until the custody hearing. And that in the interim, the child be placed in my care.”
“You’re insane.”
“I have three pediatricians willing to testify that Lily’s low birth weight puts her at increased risk. They will state that a home with no established pediatrician, limited financial resources, and a history of domestic violence is not an appropriate environment for a medically fragile infant.”
“Those doctors work for you,” I said. “You paid them to say whatever you want.”
“Prove it,” Diane smiled. “And while you’re trying, I’ll be at the courthouse convincing the judge that my grandson—”
“Granddaughter.”
“—that my grandchild is safer with me. I have a nursery already prepared. The best furniture, the best monitor, a nanny on call twenty-four hours a day, a pediatrician on retainer. You have a secondhand crib and forty-seven dollars to your name. Who do you think a judge will choose?”
The door opened.
Ryan walked in, holding two coffee cups.
He saw Diane and his lawyers.
The cups slipped from his hands and shattered on the floor.
“Get out,” Ryan said. His voice was low and dangerous.
“Ryan, darling,” Diane said. “We were just discussing Lily’s future.”
“I said get out.”
“Or what? You’ll hit me again? Go ahead. There are two witnesses here. And I’m sure the judge would love to hear that you assaulted your own mother in a hospital room hours after your daughter was born.”
She walked toward the door.
At the threshold, she turned back.
“One week, Ryan,” she said. “One week and all of this ends. You’ll see. I always get what I want. I always have.”
She left.
Ryan dropped to his knees beside my bed and buried his face in my lap.
“I can’t do this anymore,” he said. “I’m so tired, Clara. I’m so tired of fighting her. Every time we think we’re ahead, she raises the stakes. What if she wins? What if they take Lily from us?”
I ran my fingers through his hair.
“She won’t,” I said. “We have your dad. We have the journal. We have the truth.”
“Truth doesn’t matter in court, Clara. Money matters. And she has more of it than we could ever earn in ten lifetimes.”
The emergency motion was heard that same afternoon.
Our lawyer argued against it passionately.
But Diane’s lawyers were better.
They were faster, sharper, more ruthless.
They twisted every fact.
They made our poverty seem like neglect.
They made our fight for survival seem like instability.
The judge didn’t give Diane temporary custody.
But she didn’t throw the motion out either.
“Given the complexity of this case and the medical needs of the infant,” the judge said, “I am ordering that Lily remain in the hospital under supervised care until the full hearing next week. Each parent—meaning both the maternal and paternal sides—will be allowed scheduled, monitored visits. No one is to be alone with the child.”
Ryan and I stared at each other in horror.
We couldn’t take our own daughter home.
And Diane would be allowed to see her.
Alone with a supervisor, yes.
But still.
She would be in the same room as our baby.
When we got back to the hospital room, Lily was gone from the bassinet.
A nurse stood by the door, looking uncomfortable.
“Where is she?” I demanded.
“The order came through,” the nurse said. “She’s been moved to the supervised pediatric wing. I’m sorry. Those are the instructions.”
Ryan ran out of the room before I could stop him.
I found him ten minutes later, sitting on the floor of the hallway outside the pediatric wing, his head in his hands.
A glass window separated us from our daughter.
She was in an isolette, tiny and beautiful, surrounded by machines and wires.
And on the other side of the glass, watching her with a look of pure possession on her face, stood Diane.
She saw us through the window.
She smiled and waved.
Then she reached through the opening in the isolette and touched our daughter’s hand.
I thought Ryan would break the glass.
I had to physically hold him back.
“Next week,” I whispered in his ear. “One more week. And then it’s over. I promise you.”
But as I looked at Diane’s reflection in the window, I wasn’t sure anymore.
She had already taken so much from us.
Our home.
Our money.
Our peace.
May you like
And now she had our daughter, if only for a week.
What if a week was all she needed?
