Ch.1: The Yellow Beanie

The mud sucking at my boots felt like it was trying to drag me down with her.

I shouldn't be here. The funeral was three hours ago. The priest had left, my mother had left, even the gravediggers had clocked out, leaving a polite distance between their machinery and my grief. But I couldn't move. I just stood there, letting the freezing October rain soak through my coat, staring at the little mound of earth that supposedly held my entire life.

Daisy.

My arms physically ached. A phantom weight, they called it. The nurse in the psych ward had told me it was normal to feel the ghost of the baby you lost, to feel the milk coming in for a mouth that would never open. *Normal.*

They kept using that word. It was *normal* that her heart stopped. It was *normal* that I didn't get to hold her because of the infection risk. It was *normal* that I was sedated when they signed the death certificate.

I pulled my phone out of my pocket, my fingers stiff and blue. I didn't want to call anyone. I just needed the blue light to burn away the gray of the cemetery. I opened Instagram, doom-scrolling through a feed of strangers' happiness, looking for anything to numb the screaming in my head.

Ad for shoes.
Video of a cat.
Political rant.
Viral "Miracle" post.

My thumb hovered.

It was a photo from last night’s 'Pediatric Hope Gala'. A high-definition, professional shot of the man who had ruined my life.

Dr. Julian Thorne.

He looked impeccable in his tuxedo, the very image of the grieving, saintly surgeon. He was smiling down at the bundle in his arms—a "miracle rescue," the caption read. A baby abandoned at the hospital steps, now under the personal care of the Thorne Foundation.

I went to scroll past. I couldn't look at his face. I couldn't look at a living baby.

Then I saw the hat.

The breath left my lungs so fast I nearly collapsed onto the wet grass. I zoomed in, pinching the screen with trembling fingers until the pixels blurred.

The baby in Dr. Thorne’s arms was wearing a yellow knit beanie.

I knew that beanie. I knew it because I had knitted it myself during those long, terrified nights in the third trimester. I knew it because I had run out of yarn on the final row and finished it with a slightly darker shade of mustard yellow. I knew it because on the third row from the brim, there was a dropped stitch that created a tiny, unmistakable hole.

There it was. The dark rim. The dropped stitch.

The world tilted on its axis. The rain didn't feel cold anymore; it felt like gasoline.

Dr. Thorne hadn't just delivered my stillborn daughter. He had looked me in the eye, told me she was gone, and then—what? Handed her to a photographer?

"No," I whispered, the sound tearing out of my throat. "No, you didn't."

I looked at the mound of dirt at my feet. The polite little plaque. The lies buried six feet deep.

If that baby on Instagram was wearing the hat I put on Daisy’s head seconds after she was born... then who was in the box beneath my feet?

The rage hit me harder than the grief ever had. It wasn't a wave; it was an explosion. It burned through the sedation, through the months of gaslighting, through the "postpartum psychosis" diagnosis they had pinned on me like a target.

I wasn't crazy. I was right.

I dropped the phone in the mud. I didn't need to check the grave, but I fell to my knees and started digging with my bare hands anyway.