Sixteen.
Brandon had been counting them too, for a very different reason.
Eventually I got up, lay down on the far edge of our bed, and pulled the blanket to my chin. Later I heard him climb the stairs, brush his teeth, and slide in beside me. He reached across in the dark and found my hand.
I kept my breathing slow and pretended to be asleep. It was the hardest thing I’ve ever done.
In the morning he kissed my forehead at the counter.
“Sleep okay?”
“Not really.”
“Baby keeping you up? I’ll grab that Thai place you like on the way home.”
He flipped his car keys up and caught them, the same gesture I’d watched a thousand times. Suddenly it looked like a stranger doing it. I said “okay,” and he left.
I didn’t want to confront him yet. If I did, he would deny it, or cry, and somehow by the end I’d be the one apologizing. I needed to understand what I had signed first.
After I dropped Daisy at school, I sat in the library parking lot and called Rhonda Pace, the independent attorney who had reviewed my surrogacy agreement. I told her everything. She didn’t interrupt.
“Marnie, I’m so sorry,” she said at last. “I won’t promise you a loophole, and I won’t guess about the contract until I’ve read it against the law in this state. But some things I can tell you now. Your medical decisions are yours. Not Everett’s, not your husband’s. And you need a family-law attorney today. Not for the surrogacy. For your marriage and your daughter.”
By lunch I had an appointment. I spent my break at the kitchen table rereading all forty-one pages. The first time, I’d skimmed the insurance and payment sections and trusted that someone would flag anything wrong. This time I read every line. Every signature looked like a decision I’d made to protect a marriage Brandon had already left in his mind.
My hands shook with anger. But anger can’t undo a signature. Understanding it was the next best thing.
I made more calls. I booked a session with Dr. Paulette Greer, the clinic counselor, for me alone. I phoned Winnie, the nurse coordinator who had been at every appointment, and asked that all information go directly to me and not through my husband. She didn’t ask why. I was grateful.
Then I called my sister, Jodi, a night-shift ER nurse who once punched a boy in the nose for stealing my bike when she was nine and he was twelve.
“Can you pick Daisy up tomorrow and keep her a few hours?”
“Of course. Are you okay?”
“No,” I said. “But I will be.”
That afternoon Daisy came home talking about a classmate whose lizard had escaped during show-and-tell and run into the coat closet. I laughed in the right places. Later I heard her through the floor, talking to my stomach.
“Okay, baby, this one’s really good. What do you call a bear with no teeth?” A pause. “A gummy bear!”
I sat on the stairs and put my face in my hands.
At five-thirty, Brandon texted: Client dinner tonight, totally forgot to tell you. Won’t be late. Love you.
He had forgotten the Thai food.
I opened our joint checking account. I’d never really looked at his side of it. Why would I audit my own husband? I scrolled back month by month and found charges at an Italian place called Bellini’s, over and over, every few weeks. I knew where Bellini’s was. It was four blocks from Everett’s house.
The dates matched nights he’d said he was working late and weekends he’d said he was covering shifts. A restaurant charge proves nothing alone. But it put dates on the lies. I kept scrolling back, and the earliest was from the previous February.
That was before the birthday cake, before he ever said the word surrogate to me.
I thought about all those nights he’d spread the mortgage statement, the car payment, and the credit card bill across the kitchen table like a hand of cards, then sat in silence until I apologized for hesitating. The bills were real. The mortgage really had gone up. But he had taken something real that frightened us both and turned it into a lever.
At breakfast I asked, “Any news on regional director?”
“Not yet.” He didn’t look up from his phone.
“Did Everett ever actually promise you the job? Ever say your name for it to anyone?”
He looked up, frowning. “Why are you interrogating me?”
It was the move he’d made a hundred times. Before, I would have reassured him instantly. I’m not interrogating you, honey, I know how hard you work. This time I said nothing. I didn’t apologize. I just looked at him until he dropped his eyes to his phone, finished his coffee, and left.
The next day Jodi picked up Daisy, and I met Lorraine Okafor, a family-law attorney whose office sat above a bakery in an old brick building downtown. She had a bowl of peppermints on her desk and photos of three teenage boys on the shelf behind her.
I talked for an hour. She took notes, then set down her pen.
“Okay. I’m sorry. This is a terrible way to find something out. I won’t tell you it’s simple. You have a marriage, a seven-year-old, a house, debt, and a pregnancy with a contract attached. We’ll untangle them one at a time.”
We covered temporary finances, the mortgage, the joint account, and a fair parenting schedule. By the end I had a list of concrete steps. In the parking lot I read it three times. It was the first time in weeks I felt I had any control over anything.
That evening I waited at the kitchen table. Daisy was upstairs, fed and bathed. Jodi had dropped her off at seven and whispered at the door, “Call me after. Any hour.”
The SUV pulled in at 8:40. Brandon came through the side door loosening his tie.
“Hey, honey. Have you eaten?”
He opened the refrigerator for a water.
“How long have you been sleeping with Everett?”
His hand stayed on the door. The cold light lit his face. He didn’t turn around.
“What are you talking about?”
“I heard you. Two in the morning, in this kitchen. You said that once I delivered, you were leaving me.”
For a long moment he didn’t move. Then he closed the refrigerator, sat down across from me, and set the unopened bottle on the table.
“I didn’t want you to find out like that.”
“How long?”
“Over a year.”
“Before you asked me to carry his baby.”
He didn’t answer. I’d seen the statements.
“Was there ever a promotion?”
“There might still be.”
“That wasn’t my question.”
He rubbed his forehead. “Everett never promised one. He never even brought it up. I thought if you believed it could help us, you’d say yes.”
I remembered his arms around my waist at the cake, his voice in the dark: I’m trying to find a way to come home.
“You already knew you wanted to leave. When you asked me, you knew. And you made me think this was how I could keep you.”
“I never said that.”
“You didn’t have to.”
I made myself ask the last question. “What did you think would happen to Daisy?”
He glanced at her school photo on the bookshelf, the one with the missing front tooth she’d practiced smiling for in the bathroom mirror for a week. He’d promised to help her on picture day and left early for a meeting instead.
“I’d never abandon her. Everett has a room upstairs. We could paint it any color she wants. She could stay with us on weekends.”
“You’ve planned a bedroom. For my daughter. In his house.”
“I want to be in her life.”
“So do I. But you don’t get to plan her life on a phone call at two in the morning.” He began describing weekends and holidays and who would do Monday drop-off. I stopped him. “No. Not tonight, and not like this. We’ll work it out with lawyers and help, not because you and Everett decided.”
