30. Eva
Eva
Four Years Earlier
Matteas’ grip on my arm is tight as he leads me to our car in the hospital carpark. The same car that has a baby capsule secured in the backseat and a ‘Baby on Board’ decal in the back window.
But my arms are empty. There’s no baby.
Our son was born sleeping, and my husband blames me.
Matteas opens the passenger side door. ‘Get in,’ he says, and the venom behind his words makes me flinch.
My body still aches from labour, my breasts are swollen and leaking, and my heart is completely broken. The hospital kept me longer than expected, giving me all sorts of medication to calm me down, dull the pain of loss. Nothing can make it go away though.
I have no one to turn to. Marrying Matteas young had alienated everyone I had before, and I didn’t care back then. I loved him so much none of it mattered. But now I could lose him and I’m terrified.
Matteas parks the car on the high street near our house. The world continues on as normal, but my brain spirals and panics about how to keep my husband and heal our pain.
‘I need to run into the post office. Do you want to stay here?’ he asks me.
I nod and reach for my purse where I have a pharmacy bag filled with all sorts of prescription medication and pamphlets on post-natal depression. I pop a bunch of pills, barely registering what they are or how many.
Outside my window, a family sits at a cafe.
A man and a woman sip coffee while their toddler wrestles with a milkshake straw, and a newborn baby sleeps in a pram next to the table.
I stare at the baby for several minutes and feel the letdown of milk in my bra, which will go to waste.
The sensation snaps me out of my trance, and the toddler squeals as she spills her milkshake down the front of her dress.
The man rushes inside the café, and the woman stands, picking up the toddler and placing her on her feet, letting the milk fall to the pavement. The toddler is crying now, loud wails, and I turn to the baby, who has been startled awake.
I don’t know what comes over me. My body moves of its own volition. While the woman’s back is turned, I approach the pram, scoop up the baby and place them in the capsule in the back of our car.
Matteas returns to the car and pulls away from the cafe. In the rearview mirror, I know the moment the woman realises her baby is gone. And right on cue, the baby cries from their new capsule.
Present Day
‘When can we go home, Mummy?’ Archie asks.
He sits in the makeshift living space on an old sofa, tapping away at the tablet I’d given him. I feel terrible. He’s used to our beautiful house in Cobal Gully with all his toys and all that space. Here, we have almost nothing. But we can’t risk going back there.
‘Soon, sweetheart.’
He doesn’t look up, just lets out a sulky huff in response.
His dark hair hangs over the front of his face. A face that doesn’t resemble mine or Matteas’ but his colouring is close enough that no one’s ever commented. The day he came into our lives was the day everything changed.
Matteas heard him cry in the backseat of our car, and we didn’t speak a word of it. He was our Archie, it didn’t matter where he came from. We took him home and he was ours now.
For weeks we monitored the news about the kidnapping in the high street, but CCTV didn’t capture our car registration or my face. A fact that made me believe it was meant to be. If our Archie wasn’t meant to be with us, we’d have been caught.
Gregor and Matteas walk through to the living area and gesture me out into the kitchen, presumably away from young ears. It had been a case of high risk paying off when it came to our meeting Gregor.
I still don’t know the details of what Matteas did before we had Archie, only that he earned a lot of money. I also wasn’t naive enough to believe everything he did was legal. When he told me he had a contact who could get us a birth certificate for Archie, I wasn’t surprised.
That contact pulled through for us with the birth certificate and a job offer. A man in the United States wanted to meet with us to discuss an opportunity.
Matteas was onboard immediately. He thought in dollar signs. I was apprehensive but no amount of guilt or fear could overcome the feeling of love I had for Matteas and Archie. I’d do anything to keep them. So here we are.
We stand around the kitchen, and I wait for one of them to say something. Matteas and I are barely on speaking terms still, and Gregor was our boss, who we’d ultimately failed.
‘We need to discuss a plan,’ Matteas says.
‘Okay,’ I respond. ‘What’s the plan?’
‘We need to leave the country,’ Gregor announces.
I shake my head. ‘Impossible. Archie doesn’t have a passport, and the police will be all over the airports.’
‘We use the woman,’ he says, and Matteas nods in agreement. ‘Her husband is a cop, he has power and a lot to lose.’
I let out a long breath. Iris, the woman I’d recently gotten to know, would not allow herself to be a bargaining chip in our escape. I was not confident in this plan at all.