Chapter 4 - The Betrayal at the Bakery
The basement went so still I could hear the hum of the chest freezer in the corner.
I stared at the red letters printed on the edible sugar sheet. My head throbbed with a terrifying, blinding rage that made my vision blur at the edges.
Bev hadn't been warming up to me over the last three months. She hadn't thrown the party out of love, affection, or joy for our healing after our loss.
She had taken our sealed medical envelope from the clinic, opened it in private, discovered that Rhett was not the biological father, and planned a public execution of our family dignity in front of forty guests—including Rhett’s ninety-one-year-old Great-aunt Ida.
She had intended for Rhett and me to lift the fondant cover together in front of his entire extended family, exposing our most private, painful medical struggle as a public scandal, shaming me, and stripping Rhett of his identity as a father before the ink was even dry on our announcement.
And my mother...
I looked at Lorraine.
My mother—the woman I had spent twelve hours hating, the woman I had blocked on my phone, the woman who had let forty guests call her a clumsy, bitter lunatic—had read those red words under the pergola lid.
She had looked across the table at Beverly Ashby. She had seen Bev standing there, waiting with a camera in her hand, ready to watch her son fold inward in front of forty people.
And my mother had made a split-second decision.
She had grabbed the cake, faked a trip over the speaker cord, thrown her body onto the table, and crushed the sugar sheet into unreadable mush with her own knees.
And when she stood up, covered in frosting, with forty people gasping in horror, she had looked Bev straight in the eyes and repeated the exact, cruel sentence Bev had whispered to me in the hospital room fourteen months ago:
Honey, you can always have another baby.
She hadn't been saying it to mock my loss.
She had been hurling Bev's own cruelty back into her face—a silent, lethal warning that she knew exactly what kind of monster Bev was.
"Mom..." I choked out, a sob ripping from my chest as I dropped to my knees on the cold basement floor. "Oh God, Mom... I'm so sorry..."
My mother immediately dropped beside me, wrapping her arms tightly around my shoulders, pulling me against her chest just like she used to do when I was a little girl.
"Shh, baby," Lorraine cried softly, kissing the top of my head as I wept against her sweater. "You don't ever have to apologize to me. You're my daughter. I would have eaten that whole damn cake off the dirt before I let that woman destroy your husband in front of his family."
"She opened the clinic envelope," I sobbed, clutching my mother's arms. "She read our medical files..."
"She went to Doie's Bakery three days before the party," my mother whispered, rubbing my back. "Doie is Bev's bridge partner. Bev paid her double to print whatever she wanted on that sheet. But Bev didn't know I walked into the kitchen right behind her when she carried the box out to the patio."
I pulled back, wiping the hot tears from my face, looking into my mother's eyes.
May you like
"We have to tell Rhett," I said, my voice shaking.
"No, Maya," my mother said softly, her expression turning dead serious. "We don't just tell him. We show him. Because Beverly Ashby isn't finished. And if Rhett doesn't see the truth with his own eyes, she will spend the rest of your pregnancy trying to poison him against your baby."
