Part 1

Only hours after my C-section, my mother-in-law threw adoption papers onto my hospital bed and ordered me to surrender my newborn son to her daughter. When I refused, she snatched him from his bassinet and announced that her daughter was waiting downstairs to take him home. She had no idea the hospital security chief was about to recognize the identity she had spent years dismissing.

My name is Imogen Hale, and the day Margot Whitlock underestimated me was the day she destroyed herself.

My incision burned as I struggled to sit up.

“Do not touch him,” I warned.

Margot ignored me. She had already decided my son belonged with her daughter, Bridget.

“Bridget needs a son, and you clearly can't handle two babies,” she said. “She'll take Owen. You can keep the girl.”

The adoption papers on my bedside table asked me to consent to Owen's adoption and relinquish my parental rights.

“These are my children,” I said. “I carried both of them. I went through surgery to bring them into this world. And you walk into my hospital room expecting me to sign away one of them?”

“Bridget has been through enough. She deserves to be a mother.”

“So do I.”

I pushed the documents away.

“No. I'm not signing anything.”

“You need to think carefully about this, Imogen.”

“I have. Get out of my room.”

Her eyes shifted toward Owen's bassinet.

“Stay away from my son!”

Margot kept walking.

“Bridget is waiting downstairs in the car,” she said coldly. “I'm taking him now.”

I forced myself upright, but the pain across my incision nearly sent me back against the bed. Margot turned and struck me across the face. My head snapped sideways against the bed rail.

“Stop making a scene,” she hissed.

By the time my vision cleared, she had lifted Owen from his bassinet. He began screaming in her arms.

“Put him down!”

“Don't worry. Bridget will know how to take care of him.”

I reached toward them, but my body would not cooperate. Owen was crying, and I could not reach him.

Then I saw the red emergency security button beside my bed.

I stretched as far as I could and pressed it.

Margot glanced at the button and shook her head.

“Don't be ridiculous. You're only embarrassing yourself.”

I kept my eyes on my son.

“Give me my baby.”

Seconds later, hurried footsteps sounded in the hallway. The door swung open, and several hospital security officers rushed into the room.

Their chief, Frank, entered first.

Margot immediately began shouting.

“My daughter-in-law is having some kind of psychiatric episode! She's clearly not thinking straight. She tried to hurt the baby! I'm protecting him!”

She had slapped me, taken my newborn son, and now she was telling security that I was the danger.

Frank's eyes moved around the room. He saw me in the bed, pale and struggling to stay upright. Then he saw Margot holding my screaming newborn.

I tried to speak.

“She's... she took my baby.”

“Please. That's my son.”

Frank looked at me, then looked again more closely, as though searching my face for something familiar.

His expression changed.

He stopped moving. His hand lowered. The uncertainty in his eyes gave way to recognition and respect.

Margot frowned.

“What is it? I told you she's having a breakdown. You need to take the baby away from her!”