Larissa, having won the mother-in-law lottery, has come to love Julia. After struggling with getting pregnant, she relies on Julia’s support. However, months after the baby is born – her husband finds something that makes them question exactly how Julia helped the situation.

When I married Toby, I was lucky enough to be one of those girls who had a magical mother-in-law. Julia was everything I wanted in a mother-in-law — she was kind and loving, and didn’t regard me just as an extension of her family. Instead, she adopted me as her daughter.

“I told you,” Toby said one day when I told him that I was so grateful Julia had accepted me.“She’s loved you since the beginning, Larissa.”

Despite her age, Julia was just full of life. She constantly walked in and out of our home, ready to throw herself into our kitchen.

“I just want to feed you guys,” she told me when I asked her to sit down, ready to cook for her instead.

“I don’t have anything else to do besides meet the ladies for drinks,” she chuckled.

It usually ended with us cooking together — Toby coming home to music and laughter echoing in the kitchen.

My parents were across the country because I had moved for college, and ended up settling down here with Toby. And as much as phone and video calls kept me close to my family, at the end of the day, Julia filled the role of a mother — a mother in close proximity anyway.

After three years of being married, Toby and I were trying to have a baby.

“I’m ready if you are,” Toby told me. “I think it’s time now.”

I agreed with Toby. I was ready — I wanted to be a mom.

So, we began trying. And for months, we just couldn’t get pregnant. And the longer we tried, the more reality set in. Maybe we just weren’t meant to have biological children.

“What do you want to do?” I asked Toby. “Keep trying?”

Toby nodded. I knew that he wouldn’t ask me to do anything I didn’t want to do, but I also knew that he desperately wanted to be a father.

So, torn, I turned to my mother-in-law for advice. Julia took me to meet with a wellness coach, she took me for fertility massages, and then, she even bought Toby and I a brand new mattress.

“Maybe your body is just not rested enough,” my mother-in-law said. “Maybe you just need to give your body the best chance possible at this.”

“Do you think that it was a bit unnecessary?” I asked Toby as we got into bed that night, testing out our new mattress.

“Normally, I would have said yes,” Toby admitted. “But maybe there’s something to what Mom said. Our mattress was horrible before. Maybe it will make a difference.”

“What do you mean?” I asked, setting Maddie down. “Did she get it into the mattress?”

Toby looked nervous. He had picked up the mattress so that it stood on its side.

“No, it’s not that,” he said.

I was perplexed, watching him struggle with words. “What are you talking about? It’s just a mattress, we’ll clean it–”

“No, Larissa,” he interrupted, his voice rising in panic. “It’s not just a mattress.”

By this point, I was sleep-deprived and slightly annoyed with my husband. Toby was not a man to fumble for his words, and yet, here he was, in the early hours of the morning, too uncertain to change the sheets.

“What?”“What are you doing?” I exclaimed, hearing the fire grow louder.

“We couldn’t keep it, honey. We just couldn’t,” he said.

Toby had a deep fear for anything esoteric – anything that bordered the supernatural was too much for him. He would have rather slept in our car than spent another night in the house with the mattress.

As the mattress burned, I kept an eye on the baby monitor, watching Maddie sleep. The silence between Toby and I was heavy with the uncertainty of what had been going on in our home.

Later, Julia came over to make was breakfast as usual. My husband took the lead, his voice steady but laced with an undercurrent of betrayal.

“Mom, why didn’t you tell us about the mattress? About the herbs?” he asked.

I poured Julia a cup of tea – despite everything that we had learned, she was still one of my favorite people. I loved her like I loved my mother.

My mother-in-law’s face crumpled, her usual vibrancy replaced by a somber guilt.

“I just wanted to help. I knew that you were having trouble conceiving, and I thought that if it worked, you wouldn’t care how. I never meant to hurt either of you. Especially not my granddaughter.”

“What else did you do? What’s in the bag? Other than the herbs?” Toby’s questions flew hard and fast around our living room.“Nothing!” Julia exclaimed, finally registering Toby’s fear. “It’s just dried herbs. I can give you a list of them,” she said. “I’ll take you both to the store where I got them from. It’s a sweet little apothecary next to my dentist. It’s a store all about natural wellness.”

“You could have just told us,” I found myself saying. “How we can trust anything you do now? How do we know if our baby is a miracle baby or just an outcome of your herbs?”

“Does that matter?” she asked, her eyes brimming with tears. “Maddie is here and she’s ours.”

I couldn’t exactly argue with that. Of course, Maddie was ours. I was just feeling wounded that Julia had done this and not told me. I also felt obligated to be angry with her – because my husband was livid.

“I’m sorry,” my mother-in-law whispered. “I really am.”

At her words, I felt Toby soften next to me.

“We need to start over, Mom,” he said. “If you plan on doing anything like this again, you have to tell us first. We need to know what’s going on in our own homes.”

Julia nodded and smiled at us. She seemed shaken that we had discovered the truth.

I was confused – there was a part of me that was eternally grateful to her because I know how difficult it was for us to get pregnant. But at the same time, how could sleeping on a bunch of herbs actually help us get pregnant?

Toby spent the rest of the day looking for mattresses online, while Julia baked us a tart for lunch. I just reveled in spending time with my daughter.

What do you think? Do you believe in natural remedies and old wives tales?