Chapter 7 - The Wrong Mother
Mother screamed that Lydia was lying.
Daniel didn’t.
He sat down as if his legs had stopped working.
“My sister was pregnant?”
Lydia answered through the phone.
“Yes.”
“With whose child?”
“I never knew.”
Mother grabbed the phone.
“You told me Naomi was mine!”
Lydia went silent.
That single sentence exposed more than Mother intended.
I stared at her.
“You knew there was a switch.”
She realized too late.
Camille backed away.
Mother began speaking rapidly.
She had delivered a daughter after a difficult pregnancy.
The baby was healthy.
Hours later, Richard’s father—my grandfather Charles Mercer—arrived.
He controlled the family then.
The hospital.
The money.
Everyone.
He told Eleanor there had been a clerical problem.
Another infant had been mistakenly placed in the nursery under the Mercer name.
He ordered everyone to stay silent.
“Which baby did you bring home?” I asked.
Mother cried.
“You.”
My entire body went cold.
“But I’m Caroline’s daughter.”
“I didn’t know that then.”
“Where was your biological daughter?”
“I thought she died.”
Camille whispered:
“Then who am I?”
Mother looked at her.
“You’re mine.”
“How do you know?”
“Because Lydia told me years later.”
That meant Camille was Eleanor’s biological daughter.
I was Caroline’s.
So why had everyone pretended I belonged to Eleanor?
Lydia answered.
Charles Mercer had made the decision.
Caroline Sloane had been involved with someone he desperately needed to protect.
Her pregnancy threatened the Mercer family.
When both women delivered near the same time, Charles saw an opportunity.
One infant disappeared.
One identity was rewritten.
Caroline was told her daughter died.
Eleanor was told her daughter survived.
And I became Naomi Mercer.
“But Camille?”
Lydia explained that Eleanor’s real baby had not died.
She had been quietly placed with a private foster family.
Years later, after Charles died, Lydia confessed to Margaret.
Grandma located the child.
Camille.
She was brought into the Mercer home and given a manufactured birth history.
I was sent to Grandma.
Not because my parents suddenly preferred Camille.
Because Margaret discovered I was not Eleanor’s biological daughter.
And she feared Richard.
I looked at him.
“Did you know?”
“Not initially.”
“When?”
“When you were six.”
A year before Maine.
“And you still let me call you Dad.”
“You were a child.”
“No. I was evidence.”
He didn’t deny it.
Then Lydia said something unexpected.
“Naomi, your grandmother didn’t send you away only to protect you.”
“What else?”
“She was protecting the house.”
I looked toward the white-stone mansion.
“What does this property have to do with me?”
Lydia breathed shakily.
“Everything.”
Grandma’s suspicious deed.
The forged power of attorney.
The waiver my family wanted me to sign.
It was all connected.
“How?”
Lydia answered:
“Because Charles Mercer never owned that house.”
“Who did?”
“Caroline.”
Daniel stood.
“That’s impossible.”
Lydia continued.
“Caroline inherited it from someone else.”
“Who?”
Before she answered, another voice appeared behind her.
A man.
Lydia gasped.
May you like
The phone crashed.
Then the line went dead.
