"Paul, you don't think that old hag got tricked by that little tramp, do you? What if she's planning to snatch the baby and run now that her registration scheme failed?"
Paul let out a groan, clearly annoyed after losing another game on his phone.
"Will you give it a rest already? If you hadn't spent two hours screaming your head off at the nurse outside the delivery room, she wouldn't be suspicious to begin with. Just shut up already. She's starting to wake up. You want to blow everything right now? Think you can fix that mess?"
Eleanor's voice lowered to a hiss, but she kept going.
"I'm just saying that if she wakes up and remembers what the baby looks like, switching them out will be harder."
Paul actually laughed.
"What's so hard about that? I already looked at both babies. They look the same. She won't know the difference."
And that was the moment everything inside me broke.
I heard every word.
The betrayal hit like cold water poured over my spine. My whole body went numb, but inside, it felt like fire—like ants crawling through my veins and gnawing at my bones.
So it was true.
My gut had never been wrong.
The son I'd almost died giving birth to the baby they claimed had 'supermale syndrome' had never even been mine.
They had switched my baby.
All those years. All that pain. All that loss.
It wasn't some tragic misunderstanding. It was planned. Deliberate.
My fury from eighteen years, buried and smoldering, erupted like wildfire.
The machines hooked up to my body began to scream, beeping faster and louder with every second.
"Amara! Wake up! Can you hear me?" someone shouted from the bed. "Amara, please don't scare me. Come on. Wake up!"
I heard Dr. Jones and Aunt Clara calling my name in alarm. Slowly, I opened my eyes, still groggy from the anesthesia.
"Amara, look at the baby. His little face is so pink and healthy!" Aunt Clara said, her voice bubbling with excitement.
But the moment I laid eyes on the child in her arms, something deep in my chest tightened. I couldn't shake the feeling. Something was wrong.
In my last life, my son had been switched.
The baby in Aunt Clara's arms shared similar features but was not identical to my son in the past. This baby clearly had warm honey-brown eyes.