My ex, Jake, chased me with a machete three years ago during a psychotic break. After his schizophrenia diagnosis, I stayed to help despite our breakup—until he threatened to “turn me into paste for his bloodhounds” when I started dating Sam. That was when I cut contact completely.

The only connection left was through Jess, my brother’s girlfriend. She’d been Jake’s friend for years and refused to pick sides.

When I got pregnant in January, I told my family to keep it quiet. Twenty‑four hours later, Jake left me a voicemail claiming he’d file for custody of “his” baby. We hadn’t spoken in over a year. Only Jess could have told him.

“When I confronted Jess, she just shrugged. “I didn’t think it would matter.”

“Jess, what did you say to him?” I asked.

“He deserved to know,” she said.

“He threatened to kill me, Jess.”

“That was during an episode. He’s better now.”

I made her promise: no more information about me or the baby. She agreed.

Last weekend was my baby shower. Eighty guests. A function room at a bar. It was supposed to be perfect.

Then I saw Jake at the bar, scanning the crowd.

Security tried escorting him out. He bit one of them, screaming that he was the baby’s real father, that we’d never really broken up. Sam and our friends tried calming him while I hid in the bathroom, sobbing.

I confronted Jess as soon as I could.

“How could you?” I demanded. “How could you tell him where I’d be?”

“How could I keep your baby shower secret from him?” she actually said.

“Because I told you to. Because he’s dangerous.”

My brother called later, begging me to forgive her. “Don’t punish me for what she did. The damage is done. Let it go.”

I hung up.

Two days later, Jake showed up at my prenatal appointment. I have no idea how he knew. I had to leave through the back while security detained him.

Yesterday, he was outside my workplace with flowers and a teddy bear, telling everyone he was surprising his girlfriend for “our anniversary.”

Jess swore she hadn’t told him anything since the shower.

But Jake knew things. My appointment times. Where I worked. When Sam wasn’t home.

This morning, I found something that made my blood freeze.

Jake had created a public Facebook page: “Fighting for My Baby: A Father’s Rights Story.” Hundreds of followers. Photos of me from years ago. Ultrasound images that looked real but weren’t mine. Long posts about how I was denying him access to his child because of his mental health condition.

The comments were horrifying. People calling me ableist. Saying I was discriminating against him. Offering him legal advice. Some even offering to help him “rescue” his baby.

Then I saw a comment from a familiar account.

Jess: “Stay strong, Jake. The truth always comes out. ❤️”

I screenshot everything and called my brother.

“Your girlfriend is publicly supporting my stalker,” I said.

“That’s not… She wouldn’t,” he said.

I sent him the screenshots.

Silence. Then: “She says it’s not her account. Someone’s impersonating her.”

“Check her phone,” I said.

“I can’t just check her phone,” he protested.

An hour later he called back. His voice was strange.

“It’s her account,” he said. “But there’s more.”

“What?”

“She’s been messaging him for months. Sending photos of you from family events. Your ultrasound pictures. Information about Sam’s work schedule.”

“Oh my God,” I whispered.

“She’s been telling him that you still love him,” my brother said. “That you’re being controlled by Sam. That once the baby’s born, you’ll come back to him.”

I dropped the phone.

Jess hadn’t just been careless. She’d been actively feeding Jake’s delusions.

“There’s something else,” my brother said when I picked the phone back up. “I found a draft message on her phone. She was planning to tell him something, but hadn’t sent it yet.”

“What?”

“Your home address. Your due date. And the hospital where you’re delivering.”

My due date was in two weeks.

“I’m packing her things now,” my brother said. “I’m so sorry. I had no idea.”

“Where is she?”

“I don’t know. She left an hour ago. Said she was meeting a friend.”

My phone buzzed. A text from an unknown number.

It was a photo of Jess and Jake at a café, taken minutes ago. They were looking at something on Jake’s phone.

Maps.

They were looking at maps.

Another text followed.

“Your SIL is very helpful. See you soon. Both of you.”

He meant the baby.

Sam grabbed his keys. “We’re leaving. Now.”

As we threw clothes into bags, my phone rang. Jess.

“I’m sorry,” she sobbed. “I thought if he just saw you, talked to you, he’d accept reality. I didn’t know he’d—”

“Didn’t know what, Jess?” I snapped.

“I didn’t know he’d bring people. There’s a van of guys outside your house. They’re from that father’s rights group. They have cameras. They say they’re going to expose you for parental alienation. He’s with them.”

I looked out the front window.

A white van was pulling up to our house. Jake got out first, but he wasn’t alone. Five men followed him. One carrying a camera, others holding signs.

“They’re live-streaming,” Jess cried. “The whole internet is watching. Jake told them you’re about to flee with his baby.”

The doorbell rang.

Sam grabbed my arm and pulled me back from the window.

The doorbell rang again, harder this time, and I could see a man through the glass panel—ball cap, phone held up, the red recording light on. Behind him, Jake paced across our front lawn, talking fast to the camera, his hands moving in big gestures like he was explaining something important.

Sam positioned himself in front of the door. I fumbled with my phone to call 911. My hands shook so badly I nearly dropped it.

The dispatcher answered. “911, what’s your emergency?”

“There’s a group of men outside my house,” I said, my voice shaking. “They’re live-streaming. One of them is my ex, he has a restraining order. He’s threatened me before. I’m pregnant. Please send someone.”

“Ma’am, are they trying to break in?” she asked.

“They’re on my property,” I said. “They’re ringing the doorbell and filming. He’s talking about taking my baby.”

“Has anyone said they’re going to harm you?” she pressed.

“Not in so many words,” I said. “But he chased me with a machete three years ago. He’s mentally ill. Please.”

She sighed softly. “Officers will be dispatched, but this is a lower priority call since there’s no active violence. It may be twenty to thirty minutes. Stay inside. Do not engage.”

I wanted to scream that this was violence, just a different kind. That waiting thirty minutes wouldn’t matter if he decided to kick in the door.

Jess was still on the line—I’d forgotten I hadn’t hung up. She was narrating the live chat between sobs.

“They’re saying… they’re saying ‘Don’t let her run with your baby,’” she stammered. “They think you’re kidnapping her.”

My stomach twisted. The baby kicked hard against my ribs like she could feel my panic.

Sam was already calling someone else. His sister, I realized.

“We need help,” he said. “Can you come around back? Don’t use the front. Don’t let them see you.”

She lived two blocks away. “I’m on my way,” she said.

We started throwing things into bags, just grabbing whatever we could reach: jeans, T-shirts, my prenatal vitamins, phone chargers. Jake’s voice carried through the walls. I could hear him talking about parental alienation, about his rights as a father. The men outside were cheering him on.

Someone knocked hard on the front window and I jumped so violently I almost fell. Sam caught me and steered me toward the back of the house.

We went out through the kitchen door into the backyard. The gate creaked open and Sam’s sister waved us over from the alley, her car idling.

We tossed our bags into the back and climbed in. She hit the gas and we pulled away fast. I twisted in the seat to look through the rear window.

The white van was still in front of our house. Jake was still on the lawn, talking to the camera.

We drove to Sam’s sister’s apartment. My hands wouldn’t stop shaking. The baby was doing flips inside me, moving constantly.

I felt horrible. My child’s first memories of the world would be this—sirens and shouting and her mother’s terror.

Sam’s sister made tea, but I couldn’t drink it. I sat on her couch, clutching the mug, staring at the wall.

My phone rang. “Detective Miranda Waters.”

The 911 dispatcher had flagged our address from previous reports and called her.

Miranda sounded furious. “I saw the live stream,” she said. “I’m heading to your house now.”

She explained that the live-streaming thing was a legal gray area. These father’s rights guys knew exactly how far they could push it. They stayed just inside the law, never making explicit threats, never actually touching the door. Technically, it was trespassing, but not criminal trespass unless they refused to leave when ordered.

“I’m going to document everything and issue formal warnings,” she said. “But unless they cross a very specific line, my hands are tied. I can’t arrest them just for being assholes on your lawn.”

The frustration in her voice was palpable.

She told me to stay where I was and promised to call me back.

Two hours crawled by.

When Miranda finally called, her news wasn’t exactly comforting. The group had left when patrol cars arrived, but they hadn’t gone far. They were still live-streaming from a public sidewalk two houses down.

“Completely legal,” she said bitterly.

Jake had given a long speech about discrimination against fathers with mental illness. Then his caseworker, Sylvester, had shown up and managed to talk him down enough to leave.

“Is he gone for good?” I asked.

“Probably not,” she said. “Just for now.”

My phone rang again before I could process that. An unfamiliar number.

I almost let it go to voicemail, but answered.

“Hello?”

“Hi, is this… is this [my name]?” a man asked. “This is Sylvester, I’m Jake’s caseworker. I’ve been trying to get in touch with you.”

His voice was tired and gentle.

He apologized for not preventing what happened. He explained that Jake had stopped taking his antipsychotics three weeks ago. He’d been decompensating, getting more agitated and paranoid, but without a clear, immediate threat, an involuntary hold was nearly impossible to arrange.

“The system isn’t set up to prevent things,” he said quietly. “We can only react once something bad already happened.”

I asked him the question that had been eating at me.

“Does he actually believe he’s the father?”

There was a long pause.

“Yes,” Sylvester said. “He completely believes it. His delusion is fixed. In his mind, you and he never really broke up. Sam is the intruder. Logic doesn’t… it doesn’t touch that.”

I hung up, my hands numb.

Sam sat down next to me. “What did he say?”

“He really thinks this is his baby,” I whispered. “He thinks I’m still his girlfriend.”

We couldn’t go home.

Our address had been blasted to thousands of people. The live stream had shown our street, our front door, even the number on the mailbox.

Sam’s sister said we could stay as long as we needed, but her apartment was tiny and I was due in twelve days. We were sleeping on an air mattress in her living room surrounded by garbage bags of our stuff.

And now the internet had taken Jake’s story and turned it into a cause.

The next morning, Detective Miranda called with an update. Jake’s Facebook page had been taken down temporarily for review, but not before gaining three thousand followers. Someone had already created a backup page.

She’d been tracking the father’s rights forums, she said. They were sharing our story, calling me “the villain,” making memes of my face next to captions like “She’s stealing his baby.” A GoFundMe had popped up overnight titled “Help Jake Fight for His Child.” It had already raised eight thousand dollars.

“People are offering to drive him to court hearings,” she said. “They’re giving him legal templates, sample filings, even tips on how to record you in public.”

I felt so tired I could barely see straight.

“Oh, and one more thing,” Miranda added. “We need to talk about your hospital.”

My stomach dropped.

“What about it?”

“Someone called the maternity wards of three different hospitals in your area this morning asking if you were scheduled to deliver there,” she said. “Claimed to be your partner. Two of them followed protocol and refused to confirm anything. The third one…”

She paused.

“Confirmed your due date,” she said. “They’ve been notified of the breach and your file is being flagged. But assume Jake knows where you’re delivering now.”

I pressed my hand against my belly. The baby kicked.

“My OB,” I said. “Should I switch?”

“You’re thirty-eight weeks,” Miranda said gently. “We’re past the point where changing hospitals is safe. But there are things we can do. I’ll set up a meeting with their security director.”

She told me to stay off social media completely. No posts. No check-ins. No group texts with location tags. She suggested I disable FaceTime and social location sharing and make sure my phone’s location services were off.

After we hung up, my brother called.

He sounded like he hadn’t slept. Jess had finally admitted everything, he said. Every message she’d sent, every photo she’d shared, every detail she’d given Jake about my life.

“I asked her how she could do this,” he said. “She said she thought she was helping. That she was advocating for someone who couldn’t advocate for himself. She said you were being unfair, and she didn’t want to be complicit.”

I wanted to scream.

“She played mediator between me and a man who chased me with a weapon,” I said. “How is that helping?”

“She doesn’t see it that way,” my brother said quietly. “She thinks you’re punishing him for being sick. She genuinely believes that.”

I didn’t know what to say to that.

That afternoon, Sam’s sister came home with a stack of printouts. She’d been researching domestic violence and stalking resources, highlighting sections about legal protections and safe houses.

But most of what she found didn’t apply neatly to us. Those programs were built around exes who sent threatening texts or showed up drunk, not schizophrenic men with father’s rights activists cheering them on.

By the time the meeting with the hospital security director rolled around, I felt like I’d been awake for a month.

We met in a small conference room near the maternity ward. Miranda was there, along with a man named Kyle who introduced himself as the head of security. He had a notebook, a laptop, and a tired look that said he’d been briefed already.

He laid it out first. The hospital was a semi-public space. People came and went constantly. They couldn’t turn it into a fortress, but they could do a lot.

First, my chart would be under a pseudonym. Not my real name, not even my initials. Jane Smith, he suggested, or something equally bland. Only a handful of staff would know the alias.

Second, I’d be instructed to enter through the emergency department, not the main entrance. Security would be notified when I arrived. No one outside my care team would be told I was there.

Third, no one would be given information about me over the phone, period. Not even family. All inquiries would be met with, “We can’t confirm or deny that person is a patient here.”

“Can he just walk in and ask for the maternity ward?” I asked.

Kyle nodded. “He can walk into the building, yes. We can’t stop him at the door just for existing. But we can keep him out of the labor and delivery unit. The elevators to that floor are badge-access only, and we can post an officer on the unit.”

“And if he lies?” I asked. “If he says he’s my husband?”

“Everyone on staff will have his photo,” Kyle said. “If he shows up, we can call the police for trespassing and violating the restraining order. But we need your cooperation, too. You can’t tell anyone your hospital. Not your coworkers. Not your extended family. No social media posts. Zero.”

I nodded. I’d already told my mom she wouldn’t find out when I went into labor until after the baby was born. She’d cried, but said she understood.

That night at the safe house, I lay in bed with my hand on my belly and whispered to the baby.

“I’m trying,” I said. “I promise I’m trying.”

Sam stroked my hair. “We’re doing everything we can,” he said. “You’re not alone in this.”

But as I clicked off my bedside lamp, I couldn’t shake the feeling that no amount of planning during the day could fully protect us from someone who had nothing left to lose.

I slept in twenty-minute bursts. Every time I drifted off, I dreamed about the machete, about the hallway camera at our old house, about Jess typing messages to Jake with hearts and smiley faces.

In the morning, my phone buzzed with a number I recognized now by heart.

Miranda.

“Two things,” she said. “One: Jake’s page is down again, permanently this time. Two: we got a judge to sign an emergency thirty-day extension on your protective order. We argued heightened risk due to your upcoming delivery. It’s not much, but it’s something.”

“And after thirty days?” I asked.

“We’ll fight for a long-term order,” she said. “But I won’t lie to you. Long-term enforcement with someone like Jake is… complicated. The order gives us leverage, not a force field.”

I thanked her anyway. I appreciated the honesty more than anyone telling me it would all be fine. At least I knew what we were up against.

Two nights before my due date, a contraction woke me out of a dead sleep. It felt like a band tightening around my whole midsection, deeper and sharper than anything I’d felt so far.

I lay still, counting my breaths, waiting for it to pass.

It did.

Then another came seven minutes later.

Then another five minutes after that.

I shook Sam awake. “I think it’s time,” I whispered.

He grabbed his phone and started timing while I breathed through each wave of pain. By the fourth contraction, I couldn’t talk through them anymore. I just focused on the pattern—peak, breathe, let it pass, rest, then again.

He called Miranda and the hospital. The plan we’d made for weeks was suddenly real.

Twenty minutes later, Miranda was at the safe house door with two officers behind her. We walked down the hallway in a little squad, my hospital bag over Sam’s shoulder, my hand on Miranda’s arm as another contraction hit.

“Remember,” she murmured. “If you see him, don’t engage. Let us handle it.”

I nodded, but I knew if I saw Jake, logic might evaporate. Labor pain had its own gravity.

We made it to the hospital without incident. No vans. No cameras. No chanting men.

Inside, the staff moved quickly. They’d done their homework. My fake name was ready. The nurse banded my wrist with “Jane Smith” and my date of birth, then whisked us into a private room.

Labor was… labor. Hours blurred into each other. Pain and breathing and monitors. In between contractions, my mind kept flicking to the door, to the hallway, to the idea of someone pushing past security.

At some point, as I was pushing, I heard someone shout in the hallway. The nurse froze for a split second, eyes flicking to the door.

“It’s fine,” she said, more to herself than to me. “Focus on me. You’re safe.”

I bore down with everything I had. The world narrowed to pressure and burning and the sound of my own grunt.

And then she was there. Sophie.

All seven pounds three ounces of her, slippery and red and furious.

They placed her on my chest. She was real. Warm and solid and squirming. I sobbed and laughed at the same time.

Two weeks later, we were still at the safe house. Jake was in a psychiatric facility on a fourteen-day hold. Jess was gone, hiding behind her parents’ lawyer. The father’s rights guys had moved on to some other cause.

We were tired and broke and traumatized.

But we were alive.

Some mornings, I still wake up convinced I hear a van door sliding open outside. My heart still races when a delivery guy knocks unexpectedly.

Sometimes I scroll back through the screenshots from Jake’s page just to remind myself I didn’t imagine it. That it was as bad as I remember.

But then Sophie laughs at something small and silly—Sam making a ridiculous face, the way the ceiling fan shadows move on the wall—and for a second, the world shrinks to just us.

I don’t know what’s going to happen with Jake long-term. I don’t know if he’ll stay in treatment or if he’ll get out and find another cause, another delusion, another person to fixate on.

I don’t know if Jess will ever really understand what she did.

What I do know is this: I am done letting other people decide what “help” looks like for me.

If loving someone means putting their reality above your safety, it isn’t love.

If advocating for someone means feeding their delusions at the expense of another person’s life, it isn’t advocacy.

If “staying neutral” means standing by while someone is hunted, it isn’t neutrality.

The world may still see Jake as a victim of his illness and me as an overprotective mother. Anonymous strangers on the internet might always believe I’m a villain in his story.

But when I look at Sophie asleep on my chest, her eyelashes resting on her cheeks, her tiny hand curled around my finger, I remember why I left. Why I ran. Why I stayed gone.

He told me once he’d turn me into paste for his bloodhounds.

Now I have someone to protect who didn’t ask for any of this.

And if the system won’t keep us safe, I will do whatever it takes to keep her out of his reach.