Kayla looked at me as if I had burned her passport with my bare hands.
She kept repeating, “You actually called them? On me?” like the shocking part was the call itself, not the fact that she had tried to leave an infant with someone fresh out of the hospital. Mason was crying harder now, his face red and breath catching, and she still didn’t pick him up. She was too busy panicking about Paris.
The CPS hotline worker stayed on the line long enough to tell me I had done the right thing. She explained that if I was physically unable to provide care and had clearly refused, leaving the baby anyway could be considered neglect. She asked if there was another safe caregiver available. I said not that I knew of—my mother was two counties away and had a habit of volunteering others before herself.
Kayla finally picked Mason up, but only because she realized she couldn’t leave without him. She started shouting at me, calling me selfish, jealous, bitter, and unstable. That word stuck with me because it made me laugh weakly against the counter. I still had a hospital band on my wrist and discharge papers on the table, and she was calling me unstable as if I had invented everything for attention.
Then my mother arrived, breathless and furious, without knocking. She rushed in like she was rescuing a hostage. The moment she saw Kayla crying, she took her side. She didn’t even look at me first. She looked at the suitcase, the baby, the clock, and asked how badly I had ruined things.
I handed her my discharge papers. She barely glanced at them. “You could have pushed through for one week,” she said. “Women do harder things every day.” That sentence hit harder than anything else—not because it was cruel, but because she meant it. In her mind, my body still belonged to the family.
