Chapter 14 - The Dead Mother
Juliana Morello had been gone three years by the time of my wedding.
Daphne remembered her.
Not enough.
Too much.
She remembered perfume.
Singing badly.
One yellow raincoat.
Hospitals.
She remembered the final months more than I wanted.
Miranda initially handled that beautifully.
That was why I trusted her.
She never said:
Call me Mom.
She helped Daphne make a memory box.
Attended a grief-support event with us.
Told her:
“Loving me doesn't subtract your mother.”
That sentence had once made me love Miranda more.
So what changed?
Not one day.
Slowly.
As the wedding approached, Miranda became less patient with Juliana’s presence.
A photograph in the hallway.
A Christmas ornament.
Daphne asking whether Mommy could:
“see the wedding from heaven.”
Miranda answered:
“I hope so.”
Then later told me privately:
“There are three people in this marriage.”
I thought she meant grief.
Therapists use similar language sometimes.
She meant competition.
When surrogacy became possible, Miranda began imagining a household that belonged entirely to the living.
Her.
Me.
A new baby.
Juliana’s daughter complicated that fantasy because Daphne carried memory physically through the house.
Same eyes.
Same expressions.
Same habit of tapping a spoon twice on a bowl.
Miranda did not hate Daphne from the beginning.
That matters.
She grew resentful of what Daphne represented:
A marriage Miranda could not be first in.
A dead woman she could not outperform.
A daughter whose grief gave her claims on my attention Miranda believed were excessive.
Nothing about that excused the staircase.
May you like
It explained how affection curdled into rivalry with a child.
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