Chapter 7 - The Phone Call to Rhode Island
The next morning, the autumn sunlight offered no comfort. It felt clinical and harsh as I sat at my mother’s kitchen table, staring at the locked box while Ethan went to check on Sophie, who was waking up in the guest room.
At precisely eight o'clock, I dialed Aunt Sarah’s landline number in Rhode Island.
She picked up on the second ring, her voice raspy and strong. "Hello?"
"Aunt Sarah? It’s Claire."
"Claire, sweetheart! Is everything alright? You're calling awfully early."
I took a deep, shuddering breath, trying to steady my vocal cords. "Aunt Sarah, I’m at Mom’s house. Something terrible happened yesterday. Mom had a psychotic episode... she didn't recognize me, and she took my baby, calling her by a different name."
There was a heavy, suffocating silence on the other end of the line. The kind of silence that confirms a fear before a single word is spoken.
"What name did she use, Claire?" Aunt Sarah asked softly, her voice dropping all its usual cheer.
"Mara," I said. "I found a birth certificate and police clippings in her closet for a baby named Mara Rose Parker, born in October 1992. Aunt Sarah... why didn't I ever know I had a sister?"
A soft, ragged sigh escaped the phone speaker. I heard the rustling of paper on the other end, as if Sarah were closing her eyes and leaning heavily against her kitchen counter.
"I prayed to God you kids would never find that box," Sarah murmured, her voice thick with emotion. "Your mother made us all swear a blood oath never to speak of it after the police closed the case."
"Tell me what happened," I demanded, tears spilling over my cheeks. "Please."
"Your mother gave birth to Mara when she was thirty-eight," Sarah explained, her voice steadying as she recounted the tragedy. "It was a difficult birth, and she stayed at Mercy General for four days. On the third night, she fell into an exhausted sleep. Someone walked into the hospital nursery, bypassed the night shift nurse, and walked out with your sister in a bassinet bag."
"Was the baby ever found?" I asked, my heart hammering against my ribs.
"Never," Sarah said bitterly. "The hospital blamed a security lapse; the police ran down every lead for six months, but the trail went completely cold. The kidnapper left no fingerprints, no ransom note, nothing. It broke your mother. She didn't speak for two months. She spent every single day sitting on the front porch waiting for a police car to pull up and bring her baby back."
"And then... and then I was born ten years later," I said, the puzzle pieces finally slamming together in my mind.
"Yes," Sarah sighed. "Your parents tried to move on. They had you, and you brought light back into their dark house. But grief like that doesn't die, Claire. It just goes to sleep in the basement of your mind. And now that your mother’s memory is fading... the locks on her brain have broken. She’s trapped back in 1992, believing she’s still a young mother whose baby was stolen from her arms."
May you like
"She thought Chloe was Mara," I whispered, shivering despite the warm indoor air. "She was packing a suitcase to run away with her."
"You need to protect that baby, Claire," Aunt Sarah warned urgently. "And you need to look after your mother. Because beneath all that confusion, her soul is still bleeding from a wound that never healed."
