Chapter 3 - The Face on the Glass
The air left my lungs in an agonizing rush. The sterile smells of the hospital room seemed to evaporate, replaced by the suffocating weight of an impossible nightmare.
"What did you say?" I asked, my voice barely a croak.
Mark dropped his head into his hands, slumping against the edge of the nightstand. A low, pathetic groan escaped his throat. "It wasn't like that, Lauren. That's not what the agreement was. You're twisting it—"
"Twisting it?" Lauren’s voice rose, cracking with hysterical fury. "Twisting it?! Four years, Mark! Four years of needles, of internal ultrasounds, of blood draws that left my veins collapsed and black! You stood there in the transfer room, holding my hand, kissing my forehead, telling me that God was finally going to give us a family! And all the while, you had already signed the secondary custody release with her!"
"Get out," I said to Mark.
He looked up, tears streaming down his face, snot running over his lip. "Evelyn, please. If I leave, Cassidy will file the paperwork with the registry tomorrow morning. You don't know what she has on me. You don't know what she can do to us!"
"I said, *get out of this room before I call hospital security and have you arrested for criminal harassment!*" I roared, moving toward him with such ferocity that he stumbled backward, knocking a plastic pitcher of ice water to the floor.
Mark scrambled for balance, looking at Lauren one last time. Her face was turned toward the window, her jaw set like granite. Realizing there was no quarter to be found here, he turned and fled, the squeak of his sneakers echoing down the linoleum hallway until the heavy fire doors slammed shut.
The room fell terrifyingly quiet, save for the hum of the heart monitor, which had spiked Lauren’s pulse to 135.
I hurried to her side, wrapping my arms around her trembling shoulders. She clung to me, burying her face into my neck just as she had when she was eight years old and terrified of the thunderstorms that rattled our old Victorian house. She wept with a violence that frightened me—deep, wracking sobs that shook the hospital bed and tore at my heart.
"I’m here, baby," I whispered into her hair, rocking her back and forth. "Mom’s here. I've got you. Nobody is taking this child. Nobody."
"You don't know what he did, Mom," she wept, her fingers clutching the fabric of my sweater so hard I felt the threads tearing. "You don't know what they did in that lab."
"Then tell me, Lauren. Everything. Start from the beginning."
It took twenty minutes for her breathing to slow enough to speak. She wiped her face with the rough hospital sheet, her eyes red-rimmed and sunken.
"Six months ago," Lauren began, staring blankly at the beige wall across from her bed, "after the second round failed, the clinic told us we only had two viable embryos left. Grade A quality. One male, one female. Mark told me that Oakridge’s storage fees were going up, and that the lab had offered a 'compassionate research discount' if we signed a cross-custody waiver for surplus material. I didn't read the fine print, Mom. I was so exhausted, so depressed... I just signed where he put the little yellow sticky notes."
My stomach lurched violently. "What was the waiver, Lauren?"
"Cassidy Vance couldn't have children," Lauren said, her voice dropping to a horrifyingly detached register. "Her uterine lining was damaged from a severe pelvic infection years ago. She had money, she had power at the clinic, but she had no eggs. Mark was our account manager, but they had been seeing each other behind my back for eight months. He promised her... he promised her that if our third transfer failed, she could use our remaining female embryo with a surrogate agency she owned in Delaware."
"God in heaven," I breathed, my hand flying to my mouth.
"Except our transfer *didn't* fail," Lauren whispered, her hand moving slowly down to rest over her swollen belly. "The female embryo was supposed to go to Cassidy’s surrogate. The male embryo was supposed to be transferred to me. But Cassidy was obsessed, Mom. When she found out Mark wasn't going to leave me—when she realized he was just stringing her along for her money—she swapped the vials."
"She what?"
"She implanted the female embryo in *me*," Lauren said, her eyes wide with terror. "And she implanted the male embryo into her surrogate three weeks earlier."
The horror of the puzzle pieces snapping together hit me with the force of a physical blow.
"The doctor’s portal yesterday," I whispered, the realization dawning in my mind like a blood-red sunrise. "You saw the result was a boy because..."
"Because Mark hacked into my patient portal yesterday morning and switched the display to show a boy," Lauren sobbed. "He knew that if I thought I was having a boy, I wouldn't ask questions. But when the cake was pink today... it meant Chloe had used the *actual* lab genetic report that Cassidy brought her. Cassidy wanted me to know. Cassidy wanted to blow up our lives in front of everyone we knew. She wanted Mark to see that the girl he gave away was right here inside me."
I reached into my bag and pulled out the yellow butcher-paper packet.
"Is this the key to that surrogate agreement?" I asked, my hands shaking as I peeled back the thick tape.
"I don't know," Lauren whispered, shrinking back against her pillows. "Open it, Mom. Please. Just open it."
I tore the yellow butcher paper apart.
Inside was not an agreement.
There was a heavy brass safety-deposit box key, stamped with the number **408 - First Horizon Trust**.
And beneath the key was an ultrasound printout, dated three days ago. At the top of the thermal paper, the patient's name was clearly printed:
*SURROGATE CARRIER: ELEANOR RIGGS.*
*FETAL SEX: MALE.*
*STATUS: VIABLE. ESTIMATED DELIVERY: OCTOBER 14.*
Taped across the bottom of the image was a handwritten note from Cassidy Vance:
May you like
*“One boy. One girl. Twins divided by greed. You have forty-eight hours to sign the parental relinquishment for the girl, Mark, or I file the federal fraud report against Oakridge—and your wife’s child becomes state evidence before she ever takes her first breath.”*
***
