I froze.
Lily explained in hushed tones that she had heard my mother-in-law, Patricia, speaking to someone when she thought everyone was asleep. Sometimes Patricia would apologize. Sometimes she would say she needed to “fix it before the baby comes.”
At first, I tried to rationalize it—grief, loneliness, imagination. But the more I thought about it, the more certain strange behaviors came back to me. Patricia forgetting things, misplacing items, acting oddly around me, and saying unsettling things about timing and the baby.
That night, I told my husband everything.
He dismissed it.
“She’s grieving,” he said. “You’re overthinking.”
But then I received a message from Lily’s mother—Lily was crying, terrified, saying my baby was in danger.
The next morning, I went back to Patricia’s house alone while she was out. Using a spare key, I entered her room and searched for answers.
In her bedside drawer, I found a journal.
What I read changed everything.
Years ago, Patricia had lost a baby girl before birth. She had never recovered from the grief. In her writings, she described hearing the child’s voice, believing the baby had been taken from her unfairly. Over time, that grief had twisted into something darker.
