Chapter 325: MAMA!
Yvette arrived two days later, uncertain, her arms crossed the way they’d been crossed in the prison waiting room, bracing for something she didn’t yet have a name for.
She looked at the child in the hospital bed for a long moment.
Hope was thin from the illness, her face narrower than a healthy toddler’s should be, but there, Yvette’s breath caught slightly there in the shape of her eyes, something familiar. Something that lived in Lumi and Lucy, too, the particular tilt at the outer corner that Yvette had always privately thought came from her own mother.
"Why am I here?" Yvette asked quietly, not quite a question yet.
"I need you to do a DNA test with her," Amira said. "Please."
Yvette didn’t understand, not fully, not at first. But she agreed.
The wait for results was its own kind of suffering. Amira sat with Hope every spare hour, reading to her, smoothing her hair, memorizing the particular way she said Mama two syllables, soft on the first, the way she always reached up afterward to touch Amira’s face as if checking she was real.
When the results came back, Amira read them alone first, in the small office, before she could let herself feel anything.
Positive match. Probability of maternity: 99.99%.
LUCIA.
Her daughter’s name, the name she had given a child she loved more than her own life had never been her name at all.
Amira sat with the paper in her hands and did not cry immediately. The crying came later, in pieces, in the bathroom down the hall, in the car, in the dark of the apartment at night with the television on for noise she wasn’t listening to.
She let herself break in private, thoroughly, completely, and then she put herself back together because there was a child who needed her to be steady for just a little longer.
She had decided, somewhere in that breaking, what she was going to do. It was the only thing she could do.
The day of discharge came.
Amira dressed Hope herself, the small yellow cardigan, the socks with the embroidered flowers, careful with the line where the IV had been, careful with everything, the way you are careful with something you know you are about to lose.
She carried her down the corridor in her arms one last time, Hope’s head tucked against her shoulder, humming one of the seven approved songs without really meaning to.
Yvette was waiting near the entrance.
Amira walked the distance between them slowly. Every step felt like it cost something disproportionate to its size.
She handed her daughter over.
"Here," she said, and her voice came out steadier than she felt, because steadiness was the last gift she had left to give. "She’s yours."
Yvette took her, and for a moment something in her face opened completely, three years of searching, of grief that had calcified into rage and then thawed again into something rawer, all of it arriving at once as she held her missing daughter for the first time since the hospital had taken her away. "Lucia," she whispered, and it sounded like a prayer.
For a few seconds, it seemed like it might simply be that. A reunion. A wrong finally righted.
Then Hope began to cry.
Not the ordinary crying of an unsettled child. Something more specific, more frightened, her small body twisting in Yvette’s unfamiliar arms, reaching back over her shoulder toward the one face in the world she trusted.
"Mama. Mama!"
Yvette tried everything, bouncing her gently, murmuring, pressing her closer, but Hope only cried harder, straining against her, her whole small body insisting on something her mouth could only say one way.
Amira had already turned to walk away. She had told herself she would not look back, that looking back would undo the only useful thing she had left to do, which was to leave cleanly so Hope could begin, eventually, to belong somewhere else.
She made it three steps.
"MAMA!"
The sound broke something in her chest completely. She turned.
Hope was reaching for her with both arms, her small face wrecked, her thin body straining so hard against Yvette’s hold that Yvette, helpless, simply could not keep her settled.
Amira crossed back without deciding to. She took her, gently, carefully and Hope collapsed against her shoulder instantly, the crying dropping in pitch immediately, her whole body going slack with relief, small fists gripping fistfuls of Amira’s shirt as if she might be pulled away again at any second.
"I’m here," Amira whispered into her hair, her own tears falling freely now, unstoppable. "I’m here, baby. I’m here."
Yvette stood a few feet away, her arms empty, watching the two of them, and something in her face cracked open in an entirely different way than it had a moment before. Not anger. Not jealousy, even though something adjacent to it moved through her.
Just the plain, unbearable sight of her daughter calling another woman Mama with her whole small heart, and meaning it completely.
—
Amara stood watching her sister, and something settled into place behind her eyes, quiet, cold, certain.
This is what Kalian wanted.
This is what Seb wanted to.
She understood it now in a way that went deeper than suspicion, the careful, patient cruelty of it. Place a child between two sisters who already shared a fault line, and let nature do the rest.
Let love itself become the weapon. It didn’t matter how it ended; either way, someone’s heart would be torn open in public, and the people who’d engineered it would never even need to show their faces for the damage to land.
If it had been my baby, Amara thought, watching Amira’s whole body curve protectively around the crying child, I don’t know what I would have done.
She didn’t know. That was the truth of it. She had built her life on careful boundaries and earned distance, and she still didn’t know what she would become if someone tried to take Justina or Josh out of her arms after three years of mornings and bedtimes and small fists holding fistfuls of her shirt.