The day after I gave birth to my twins, they were stolen from me. I spent two years searching for th…
Chapter 1
The ceiling above me was yellowed with age. My lower abdomen burned from the C-section, and two clear bassinets stood beside my bed. Inside them slept the babies I had mourned for an entire lifetime.
My son.
My daughter.
Alive.
For several seconds I could not breathe. Then the woman in the next bed leaned toward me with a red apple in her hand, and every drop of warmth left my body.
“Honey, you should eat,” she said. “You need your strength.”
Linda Hayes.
In my first life, Linda had been the pleasant stranger who offered to help me because I was alone. One day later, she vanished with my newborns. Months afterward, she appeared at my husband’s military base claiming to be Sarah Miller—me—the abandoned wife of Commander Arthur Sterling.
Arthur believed her.
My children believed her.
For forty years, Linda lived inside the life she stole from me.
Now she smiled from the neighboring bed as if none of it had happened.
“Thank you,” I managed, keeping both hands beneath the blanket so she would not see them shaking. “I’m not hungry.”
Her smile slipped for a fraction of a second.
Then she poured warm water into a cup and moved closer.
“Where’s your husband? Hasn’t he come?”
“No.”
“What about your family?”
“They’re not nearby.”
“Your husband’s people?”
I remembered those questions.
In my first life, drugged from surgery and exhausted from labor, I had answered every one. Linda had learned that my husband was stationed hours away, that his parents were dead, and that nobody expected to visit me soon.
She had not been making conversation.
She had been calculating.
Linda glanced toward the bassinets. “Why don’t I watch them tonight? You need sleep.”
Her fingers moved toward my daughter’s blanket.
I caught her wrist.
“Don’t touch my children.”
The ward went quiet.
Linda stared at me, startled. Then her eyes filled with tears so quickly I almost admired the performance.
“I was only trying to help.”
A woman across the aisle frowned at me. “She’s been nothing but kind.”
“You’re exhausted,” another mother said. “Let somebody help you.”
Linda lowered her gaze as if I had wounded her.
That was how she had succeeded before.
She knew exactly how to make suspicion look cruel.
I moved both bassinets against my bed.
Linda stood there another moment, studying the little cards attached to them.
Boy.
Girl.
She leaned slightly closer.
“Your little girl is beautiful,” she said, looking directly at my son’s crib.
My heart stopped.
The same mistake.
In my first life, Linda had mixed them up before taking them.
She realized it a second later and smiled. “I’m so tired myself. I meant your boy.”
I smiled back.
“Of course.”
For the next two days, I refused everything Linda offered me. Tea. Soup. Medicine she claimed a nurse had forgotten. On the third night, she brought me porridge and watched until I lifted the spoon.
I waited until she turned away, then dumped it into the trash.
By then, my incision throbbed constantly. My milk had barely come in. The twins seemed to coordinate their crying so that whenever one slept, the other woke.
A nurse checked my blood pressure and frowned.
“One-sixty over one hundred. Mrs. Sterling, you need help. Is there anyone we can call?”
My throat tightened.
There was.
Arthur.
Our marriage had never been romantic. Years earlier, his parents had been forced from the city and sent to the rural county where I grew up. When a landslide nearly buried them, I helped pull them from the mud. They treated me like family afterward, and when Arthur returned from military training, they pressured him into marrying me.
He was dutiful.
Polite.
Absent.
After one brief night together, I became pregnant. I never told him.
In my first life, I had convinced myself that a man who barely came home would not want children.
Then, after death, I watched Arthur become a father to the twins Linda stole.
He carried our son through snow when the boy was sick. He sat beside our daughter’s bed through fever. He attended school programs, taught them to ride bicycles, and saved every childish drawing they handed him.
He had loved them.
He simply never knew they were mine.
That memory gave me courage.
“I need a telephone,” I told the nurse.
She helped me shuffle toward the station. Every step pulled against my stitches, but fear kept me upright.
“Please connect me to Commander Arthur Sterling at Fourteenth Division headquarters. Tell them it’s an emergency.”
Minutes later, his voice came through the receiver.
“Sterling.”
My knees nearly gave way.
“Arthur. It’s Sarah. I’m at Clear Creek County Hospital.”
Silence.
Then: “Sarah?”
“I need you to listen. I—”
A nurse hurried past me toward the ward, helping an elderly man who seemed unsteady on his feet.
Something inside me screamed.
I dropped the receiver and stumbled toward my room.
The door stood open.
The bassinets were empty.
Two shallow dents remained in the mattresses.
My children were gone.
