Chapter 9 - The First Page Was About the Wedding Photo
The oldest strange drawing appeared almost six months earlier.
Before Noah.
Before the missing sock.
Before any nursery incident.
It showed a framed photograph from Mateo and Camille’s wedding.
Lila had drawn herself standing beneath it.
Camille beside her.
A speech bubble:
YOU HAVE ANOTHER MOM.
Mateo looked at Camille.
“What is this?”
Camille frowned.
Then remembered.
One afternoon Lila asked why Camille was in so many new family pictures when her biological mother, Elena, was not.
Elena had died when Lila was two.
Mateo kept photographs throughout the house.
Camille never tried to remove them.
But the relationship between grief and remarriage had never been simple.
Lila asked:
“Are you my new mommy?”
Camille answered:
“You had a mommy. I’m Camille.”
A good answer.
Then Lila asked:
“Does Daddy love you more?”
Camille froze.
She later answered:
“People can love more than one person.”
Also reasonable.
But what Lila remembered was Camille crying afterward.
That was the first page.
Not hostility.
Pain.
Camille admitted she had always felt she was competing with a woman who was not alive to disappoint anyone.
Elena existed in photographs.
Stories.
Mateo’s gentlest memories.
Lila’s longing.
Nobody spoke badly of her.
How could they?
Camille felt monstrous for resenting the comparison.
So she never said it.
Instead, resentment attached itself elsewhere.
Lila’s bond with Mateo.
The old bedtime rituals.
The photographs.
Then Noah arrived.
For the first time Camille had a child whose history began entirely with her.
That brought joy.
And guilt.
Because some part of her felt relief at having one relationship in the house where Elena had never existed.
Mateo heard it without interrupting.
Then said:
“You thought Lila threatened that.”
Camille looked horrified.
“No.”
But after a long silence:
“Sometimes.”
There.
An ugly emotion spoken plainly.
Not a plan.
Not hatred.
But something she had refused to name until it began shaping behavior.
The staged incidents were not just about forcing family conversations.
They gave Camille a story that made her own resentment feel legitimate:
Lila is acting out.
Lila is jealous.
Lila is creating the tension.
If the problem belonged to the child, Camille did not have to confront the shameful parts of herself.
That was the deeper engine.
And once Mateo understood it, he knew the next question could no longer be:
What did Camille put under the crib?
May you like
It had to become:
What had everyone been putting onto Lila because she was too young to resist the story?
