“You’re just a young, inexperienced mother,” she used to say with a confident smile.
“I know better than you.”
And then one day — everything changed.
“Don’t worry. She’ll never find out who you really are.”
I walked into the room, my voice trembling.
“Margaret… what are you saying? What do you mean by that?”
She turned toward me, her expression unreadable.
The silence stretched, heavy and cold. Then she said quietly:
“This is Peter… and his biological mother is Jemma.”
My knees almost gave way — I grabbed the edge of the table for support.
“Peter?” I whispered. “Our Ethan’s name is Ethan…”
Margaret sighed, her hands trembling.
“I know. Jemma gave birth a few days after you did. I don’t know how it happened, but that night… there was a terrible mistake.”
She paused, looked at Ethan, and added softly:
“I’m sure your Ethan — your real Ethan — died that night. I couldn’t let you live with that grief. So I brought him home.”
I felt my body go cold. What was she saying?
She went on — her voice low, broken — explaining that her own daughter, Jemma, had died during childbirth, but her baby had survived.
She raised him as if he were my Ethan. And somehow, over the years, the lie had rooted itself so deeply that even she no longer knew where truth ended and illusion began.
“We only wanted to save you, my dear,” she said, tears welling in her eyes.
That night, we called the hospital and, after endless confusion, learned the devastating truth:
The records confirmed it — Ethan, the baby we had raised, was indeed Jemma’s child.
Our real son had died minutes after birth.
The room spun around me.
The floor seemed to vanish under my feet.
Margaret fell to her knees, crying uncontrollably.
The DNA test later proved everything.
