Chapter 9
834words
Tina was shrieking, "My baby!!! I'm so sorry!!!"
Zach came rushing in. "What's wrong?! What happened?! What are you crying for?!"
Tina could only keep wailing, "My baby… My baby!!!"
Feeling a sense of foreboding, Zach walked up and unwrapped the swaddle to see that it wasn't my daughter, but the son they were so obsessed with!
The bastard's cheeks were purple, and he wasn't breathing at all, clearly having been strangled to death.
"What? How?! It should be Olivia's daughter!!!" Zach blurted as his knees buckled, and he collapsed on his bottom.
The nurse entered just then and upon seeing the infant's condition, promptly attempted resuscitation.
"What?! How?! He was alive just a second ago! How could he have died?!"
Zach then wheeled on me and promptly blamed me. "It must have been you! How could you do this to a baby?! He was just born!"
I laughed despite my rage. "Are you crazy? The nurse called me out to change my bandages. I didn't even have time to do anything."
Zach kept hollering nonetheless, "Then you must have done it before you left! Everyone here knows you hate that boy… No one else is sick in the head but you!"
Everyone was leering at me suspiciously right then. It was as he said, and everyone in the hospital knew how I doted on my daughter and clearly despised that boy.
Tina soon recovered as well and wailed at me, "If you don't like the boy, you can just give him to me! I can't bear a child, I could only dream of having one! How could you be so cruel!?"
Even though her words were earnest and even brought some of the bystanders to tears, I simply smirked at them and clapped at Tina when she finished.
"Oh, that's a line to remember," I laughed. "You really deserve an award, but unfortunately for you, I was prepared, or you might really have won."
Walking to my bedside drawer, I took out a pinhole camera from the flowers my friend had sent me.
Looking at the nurses, I then said, "Please call the cops. There's been a murder, and I have evidence."
Then, turning back to Zach and Tina, I laughed as they went slack-jawed. "What, are you stupid? Did you think I'd leave my baby girl here alone? I just had to make sure I was hiding your bastard's face, and you did the rest."
Tina had to be quick, while also avoiding leaving fingerprints to shift the blame on me.
That was why she strangled the infant without even lifting the canopy to check.
Apparently, he flailed around for a while and suffocated to death before long.
Still, Tina had to confirm the infant's death, so she lifted the canopy with the back of her hand, only to realize that it was not my daughter.
The cops soon arrived and arrested both of them.
Tina, trying to lighten her crime, said she was strangling her own son because it hurt to see him suffering, and she didn't want that to continue.
She even dared the jury to do a maternity test if they doubted her.
While she somehow managed to plant doubt, and the court made inquiries, they were simply told that I had cremated the boy and sprinkled the ashes out in the sea.
Without anything to prove her words, Tina's attempt to bail herself out was crushed.
In reality, I had simply expected her to pull such a move. But being the biological mother registered on the birth certificate, I had every right to decide what I should do with the boy's remains.
Tina despaired when she was told and finally confessed everything, and Zach was implicated as well as an accomplice.
All they could look forward to was prison, and since Zach refused to divorce me, I gouged as much as I could from it, liquidating most of his assets as his legally married wife, converting almost everything to cash and saving it in an account under my daughter's name.
Eventually, Tina was handed a life sentence as the principal offender, while Zach was let off easy with just ten years.
Nevertheless, when Zach was finally released ten years later, my daughter was already in grade school.
He tried to find us, but we had moved out, and the city where we used to live had also changed drastically.
With his parents gone too, he didn't even have a place to stay.
He ended up fighting for turf with some homeless bums under a bridge, who eventually mobbed him and beat him to death, while his rotting corpse was only found after putrefaction.
As it happened in some quiet far flung corner, there were no cameras, and the perpetrators were never found.
Being his sole remaining next-of-kin, I told the police to give up the search.
He could reincarnate for all I cared—he wasn't worth my time, while my daughter and I would live our best lives.
