2: 2
I stared at that photo, and cold sweat broke out across my palms in an instant.
The others were already lighting into her:
"Tilda Fox, are you sick in the head?!"
"Mia's pregnant, and you send a photo like that. Are you trying to freak her out on purpose?!"
"If you've got a problem, go get help. Don't come in here with your creepy ghost nonsense. Delete it, now!"
But Tilda acted like she hadn't seen any of it, and asked again:
"Your mother-in-law… she makes you eat a goose egg every single day, doesn't she?"
My chest tightened. How did she know that too?
"What would you know?" I shot back before I could stop myself.
"My mother-in-law says goose eggs clear fetal toxins. My morning sickness has been bad, and she was worried I wasn't getting enough nutrition, so she—"
Then it hit me. My appetite had shot up right around the time she'd started giving me goose eggs.
At first the nausea had been constant. I couldn't stomach a thing, and I dropped almost fifteen pounds in no time.
My mother-in-law was beside herself and rushed me to a doctor.
He said morning sickness was perfectly normal in early pregnancy, but she wasn't reassured. She was terrified my body couldn't take it.
Later she heard somewhere that goose eggs could clear fetal toxins and build me back up.
So she rode a bus for hours out to the countryside, going from one village to the next collecting goose eggs.
By the time she got back, both her hands had raw red welts pressed into them from the load.
But she just smiled at me and said:
"Mia, I don't trust the eggs you buy in stores. These are from free-range country geese. Best nutrition you can get."
After that, she cooked me a goose-egg dish every day.
Boiled goose eggs, goose-egg custard, pan-fried goose eggs, goose eggs scrambled with tomato… almost every meal.
When I finally couldn't face them anymore, her whole face fell.
"Mia, these weren't easy to get."
"You're carrying a child. If you don't eat, how is your body supposed to hold up? If you fall short on nutrition, it'll break my heart."
Looking at all that worry in her eyes, I gave in, the way I always did.
From then on I made myself eat one goose egg a day.
Right then, another message came through from Tilda.
"Think about it carefully. Those marks on your belly—didn't they start showing up after you began eating the goose eggs?"
My breath caught.
Without thinking, I looked down at my swollen belly.
That creeping, vine-like red mark had spread across a wide patch of skin, though I couldn't say when.
And it… really had appeared after I started eating the goose eggs.
At first it was just a small, faint patch of red.
Then the lines grew denser, the color deeper.
And at the same time, my appetite kept growing.
I'd thought the pattern looked strange, but the doctor and my mother-in-law both said it was only stretch marks.
She'd even bought me a whole stack of imported stretch-mark cream and told me to rub it on every day.
"You're six months along now. If I'm not wrong, those marks have almost reached your chest by now, haven't they?"
I froze where I sat.
Even my husband didn't know about this. So how did she?
I forced down the unease and typed back through gritted teeth:
"Quit with the spooky act! They're just normal stretch marks!"
But Tilda wrote: "Talking tough won't help you, because you…"
Before she could finish, she was kicked straight out of the group.
"Mia, ignore her. She's a lunatic!"
"Sending a corpse photo is bad enough, then she makes up this garbage to scare a pregnant woman. Absolutely sick."
Just as everyone was piling on Tilda, Zoey, who hadn't said a word this whole time, suddenly typed a line.
"But… do you guys remember Selina Donaldson?"
"Back then Tilda said Selina had something bad clinging to her, said she wouldn't last a month. Selina didn't believe her. And not long after, she hanged herself in a classroom at school…"
The words had barely landed before someone shot it down.
"That's nonsense! Selina got depressed after a breakup, that's all. What did it have to do with Tilda?"
"She just got lucky with a wild guess, plain and simple!"
I watched the messages scroll past, and the cold in my chest kept deepening.
After turning it over and over, I decided to call Tilda and get a straight answer.
The call had just connected when my mother-in-law walked in, all smiles, carrying a bowl of scrambled goose eggs.
"Mia, here, eat these scrambled eggs. A little something extra!"
I looked at that steaming bowl of goose eggs, remembered what Tilda had said, and my stomach heaved.
Then I glanced up and met the hope in my mother-in-law's eyes,
thought of how those goose eggs had worn her ragged, and a wave of guilt washed over me.
But the second I lifted the egg to my mouth, Tilda's voice came bursting through the phone:
"Don't eat it!"
"Mia Henson, don't you get it? What you're eating isn't a goose egg at all!"
