She Is Your Daughter

1
My four-month-old niece was choking, milk flooding her lungs. She was rushed to the ER. The first person my mother called… was me.
Her voice was laced with guilt, each word careful, as if to avoid wounding me.
“Honey… Rosie… she’s not going to make it. Do you want to come say goodbye?”
It was three in the morning. Darkness draped the world, wind rattling the trees—a sound that chilled me.
I didn’t understand my mother’s tone, but the urgency shook me awake. My husband Mark and I threw on clothes and raced to the hospital.
Outside the ICU, the scene felt surreal. My sister-in-law Jenna touched up her lipstick casually, like she’d been out clubbing. My brother Kevin held a critical condition report with his daughter’s name, yet shrugged and decided to stop treatment.
“She’s a burden,” he said. “Keeping her alive is wasting money. Let it go. I don’t want to save her.”
Mark shot me a confused look. “Four months ago, she was everything to them. Now she’s a ‘burden’?”
I sighed, bitterness washing over me. “It’s simple, Mark. They think that baby is ours.”
Jenna finished applying a fresh coat of crimson to her lips and shot me a look of pure contempt. A smug smile played on her face, a silent declaration of some secret victory. When she spoke of Rosie, her voice dripped with a sick sort of pleasure.
“Just a girl,” she sneered. “If she dies now, at least she’ll save the family some money. It’s not easy making a living these days, you know?” She added, “Born unlucky. What can you do?”
My mother shot her a sharp, warning glare, then turned to Mark and me, her expression cautious. “You two… do you want to go in and see her? This might be the last time.”
Mark’s hand tightened on my sleeve, a sheen of sweat breaking out on his forehead. “Mom, if anyone should see her, it should be her own parents, right? Why are you asking Pathy and me first?”
In my last life, my mother had asked the exact same question.
Back then, I was so overwhelmed by the sudden tragedy, so consumed with worry for the baby in the ICU, that I didn’t notice the strangeness in her words. Instead, I pleaded with my brother, Kevin, to keep fighting for her.
“If it’s about the money, I can pay for it! Rosie was perfectly healthy yesterday, how could this have happened?” I’d cried. “Please, just try everything! There might still be a chance. This is a life we’re talking about!”
A look of profound sadness crossed my mother’s face then. Tears streamed down her cheeks as she slapped herself, hard. “I’m so sorry, Pathy,” she sobbed. “It’s all my fault. I didn’t burp her properly after her feeding… she must have choked. I was so tired, I just fell asleep for a second, and when I woke up, her face was blue. I wish it were me in there! I’d trade my life for hers in a heartbeat!”
In my past life, I couldn’t understand why she was apologizing to me. The baby in that room was Jenna’s daughter.
Jenna and Kevin sat on a long, blue bench down the hall, completely unfazed by my mother’s dramatic display. They were scrolling through TikTok, the tinny music from a dance video loud enough to drown out her sobs. The atmosphere was bizarre, surreal.
The sharp scent of antiseptic burned my nostrils. Nurses and doctors rushed back and forth, their faces grim. Through the glass window of the ICU, I could see Rosie’s tiny body, a fragile doll entangled in a web of tubes. My heart clenched.
I couldn’t let them give up.
I pulled my bank card from my wallet and handed it to Mark. “Go, deposit fifty thousand dollars into her hospital account. Now.”
But the moment my mother saw the card, her expression changed. She threw up a hand to stop us. “No! That money is for your little Peanut! You save that for her future.”
I was baffled. Just a moment ago, she was saying she’d die for Rosie. Now, her tears were gone, her face a mask. She wouldn’t even let us spend money to save the baby’s life. Was fifty thousand dollars really more valuable than Rosie’s life? At a moment of life and death, her sudden clarity about whose money was whose felt deeply, horribly wrong. But I couldn’t bring myself to question her in front of my brother.
Our daughter, Peanut, and their daughter, Rosie, were born just minutes apart in the same hospital. After that, my mother was constantly at our house, always cooing over the babies. As a mother myself, I knew the gut-wrenching pain of seeing a child suffer.
I had hoped that the sight of the money would convince Kevin and Jenna to change their minds. But their response was eerily identical to my mother’s.
Kevin clicked his tongue. “That little brat isn’t worth my sister’s money. That cash is for Peanut.”
Jenna’s face, when she saw my bank card, turned even paler than it had been when she first heard Rosie was dying. “Such a waste,” she murmured, her eyes fixed on the card. “All that money on her… what a complete waste.”
I didn’t know it then, but the baby lying in that room, the one they were so willing to discard, was my own daughter. The daughter I had fought for through a grueling labor and an emergency C-section, a battle that had taken me to the edge of death and back.
That child, dismissed and abandoned on the brink of death, was the one who should have been my precious Peanut.
From the moment she was admitted to the moment she took her last breath and left this cruel world, Mark and I never got to hold her. We never got to call her our darling, never got to press her tiny forehead against our cheeks and feel the warmth of her skin. Her helpless little body was just a canvas for tubes and wires, lying silently on a sterile pediatric bed.
That image replayed in my mind a million times.
Until I was reborn, I could never let it go.
In my past life, my mother, brother, and sister-in-law had planned it all from the beginning. They would swap their baby with mine and have me raise her. It was my mother’s idea.
“Your sister married well, and she’s successful herself,” she’d told them. “If you give her your child to raise, the baby will have the best of everything—the best education, the best opportunities. And she’ll inherit everything. Think about it. Your retirement will be completely secure.”
Jenna had grinned from ear to ear, her mind filled with images of my closet full of Louis Vuitton bags. She agreed instantly. Kevin, smug at the thought of someone else raising his child, didn’t even bother to learn the first thing about caring for a newborn.
“I’m the only son,” he’d declared, picking up his phone to start a game. “It’s my sister’s duty to help raise my kid.”
With everyone on board, my mother had kicked back, grabbing a handful of snacks from the table and turning on the TV. “Besides,” she’d said casually, “your sister will have nannies for her baby. Our little one… we’ll just have to make do.”
It was that reckless indifference that led to my daughter choking on milk in their care.
Not long after they gave up on the rescue effort that day, the baby died. A doctor, his face full of pity, wrapped her in a white receiving blanket and brought her out to the family.
But my mother recoiled, calling a dead baby "bad luck." She stood frozen, refusing to take her. Kevin and Jenna had already called a cab and left.
Just like that, my daughter was abandoned, alone in that cold, empty hospital.
Their heartlessness disgusted me, but I felt powerless. What could I do? They were their own family.
In my past life, I told myself that even though I wasn’t her mother, we shared blood, a connection. So, with Mark’s encouragement, I stepped forward and took the poor, tiny bundle from the doctor’s arms.
I didn’t know that it would be the first and the last time I would ever hold my own child.
From the cremation to the burial, my brother’s family never showed up. They never contributed a dime. Mark, though confused, tried to comfort me. “It’s okay, we’ll handle it. Maybe… maybe they’re just so heartbroken they’re pretending it never happened.” He sighed. “I can’t stop thinking about her. Taking care of this myself… it gives me some peace.”
I convinced myself he was right and arranged everything perfectly. But every time I saw that tiny, black casket, I felt a piece of me had been carved out, leaving a hollow, aching void. I didn't know what it was, but something had been stolen from my very soul.
I couldn’t bear to look. The thought of that poor baby brought on endless fits of weeping. I couldn’t eat, couldn’t sleep. I grew thinner and thinner, a ghost haunting my own life. Mark worried I had postpartum depression and took me to a therapist, which helped, but the wound never truly healed.
What I never expected was how doting Kevin and Jenna were to our daughter, Peanut. Over the years, they showered her with affection, spoiling her even more than I did. They bought her anything she wanted, things they would never dream of buying for themselves.
And as Peanut grew, she started to look more and more like Jenna. Especially her eyes. Mark and I both have double eyelids, but Jenna has monolids. So did Peanut. And they had the exact same upward tilt.
The ugly thought circled in my mind, a vulture I couldn’t shoo away.
“Mark,” I asked one day, “don’t you think… Peanut and Jenna look a little too much alike?”
He froze. As he replayed the years in his mind, a chill ran down his spine. “Why have they never had another child?” he murmured. “And they’re always so… intense with Peanut. And their behavior at Rosie’s funeral… it was so cold. Thinking back, none of it makes sense.” He paled. “Just the other day, your brother asked me to sign the deed to the Lakeside Villa over to Peanut. They’re obsessed with making sure she inherits our wealth.”
Before we could investigate, it was all over.
The day Peanut returned from studying abroad, my brother and sister-in-law held a press conference.
On camera, my mother cried hysterically while Jenna dabbed at her eyes. “It’s all my fault,” my mother wailed. “I was changing their diapers when they were babies, and I must have mixed them up! Our Peanut… she’s my son’s biological daughter!”
She produced a DNA test—prepared long in advance—and ambushed us with it.
Peanut, the daughter we had raised with all our love, clearly knew about it already. She went live on social media, tearfully reuniting with her “real” parents and changing her last name without missing a beat. The story went viral. The headlines praised her as a good girl who hadn’t been corrupted by her adoptive parents’ wealth, a paragon of filial piety. She gained millions of followers overnight.
Mark and I were left to weep at a small, lonely grave in a forgotten corner of the cemetery.
The truth was, the babies were never even in the same room for my mother to “mix up.” Unless she had done it on purpose. But years had passed. The evidence was gone, buried with the truth.
Overnight, Mark’s hair turned gray. I aged a decade, the life force drained out of me. We had raised Peanut for years; we loved her. After the truth came out, we cut off all contact with my family, but we knew the girl herself was innocent in the swap. We didn’t blame her, but she was no longer our daughter. The closeness was gone.
But then, at her birth parents’ urging, she came to us, feigning a desire to "reconnect." She invited us to go hiking. And on a scenic overlook, she shoved us off a cliff with a vicious grin.
After our deaths, Peanut inherited our entire fortune and lived happily ever after with her doting, "real" family.
A wave of pure hatred jolted me back to the present.
I linked my arm through my husband’s, giving him a reassuring squeeze. A soft smile touched my lips as I echoed his earlier question.
“You’re right, Mom,” I said sweetly. “If Rosie doesn’t make it, shouldn’t Kevin and Jenna be the ones to say goodbye? They are her parents, after all.” I paused, letting the words hang in the air. “Anyone who didn’t know better might think we were her parents.”
I turned to my brother and his wife. “And are you two really sure you don’t want to keep trying to save her?”
Jenna’s lip curled in a sneer. “That cursed thing was lucky to live in our house for a few months. No good fortune at all. Choking on milk, of all things.” She laughed, a short, ugly sound. “She either had it coming or was paying for sins from a past life.”
Kevin didn’t even look up from his phone. “Yeah, sis, mind your own business. Peanut is safe and sound at home. Just focus on your own kid.”
I looked toward the ICU, at the tiny form hooked up to all those machines, and a cold smile spread across my face. It was time to give them a little hint. A slow cut is always the most painful. Why should they get to wait eighteen years for the truth when I could give it to them now?
“You know,” I said conversationally, “Rosie is only four months old, but she already looks so much like Jenna. Those monolids are identical. Not like our Peanut. She has double eyelids, just like her dad.”
Kevin’s expression froze. A flicker of confusion crossed his face. “That’s not right,” he muttered to himself. “Weren’t both kids already…”

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