Page 29 of Nine Months to Bear

13

OLIVIA

The drive back to the office is a blur. My brain has been buffering, all systems overheating with the processing power required to understand how the hell I got myself here.

But I didn’t just getmyselfhere, did I? I took half a dozen other women down with me.

I glance down at the folders piled high on my desk, the stacks of candidates I spent all night making up. They’re fake, because I wanted to see just what would happen if Ididgive Stefan what he wanted. And I made them the best of the best so I could offer them up to Stefan like lambs to slaughter, positive he wouldn’t be able to refuse.

Candidate three’s photo peeks out at me from the bent corner of the folder. Viktoria Fitzsimmons: Olympic swimmer, PhD candidate, fertility markers off the charts. The kind of woman any man would want, the kind of daughter any mother would approve of. The daughter my own mother probably lays in bed praying for at night.

And yet, Viktoria, along with every other woman I invented, was dismissed with barely more than a glance—variations of “not good enough.”

He chosemeinstead.

My thoughts reverberate in the quiet room, dense with all the disbelief I still feel. Give me years of therapy and journaling and I still don’t think I’ll ever be able to explain quite what happened in that meeting.

I know exactly what I want.

Me?I wanted to laugh.Out of everyone you have access to, you wantme?

It’s not that I think I’m a dog or the bottom of the reject pile or anything. I’ve been on the dating apps enough to know that there are plenty of men willing to swipe right with nary a second thought.

But being chosen for an hour-long date and a few overpriced cocktails is a hell of a lot different thanbeing chosen to carry someone’s future children.

Stefan is a billionaire. He could have his sperm overnighted to Paris and injected into some high-fashion model within the day if he wanted.

But he choseme.

Finally, I do laugh. I tip my head back and cackle. By the time the echo makes it back to me, it sounds thin and sad… and I’m not laughing anymore.

I drop my forehead onto my folded arms and let out a pitiful sob instead.

I’m descending into some kind of crazed, hysterical madness, but hey, it’s not like it matters, right? There’s no one around to witness it. I’m alone. Whether here at the office or at home, I’m alone. Everyone else has long since fled back to their neat, cozy little lives, safe in the knowledge that if I go belly up, they can jump overboard and find another career.

Not me, though. But I’ll be stuck here, going down with the wreckage of mine.

Suddenly, a blue pulse of light washes over my desk. I look up at my computer screen as a new email fills the screen. It’s from a patient named Georgia Hadley and labeledUrgent, which twists my stomach into familiar knots.

I only have to read the first line to know it’s not an email I want to finish.

Thanks for all of your help so far, Dr. Aster, but I’ve decided to move my care to the office of?—

I click out of the email before I can finish the sentence. No good can come of that. Besides, I already know what it was going to say.

I know exactly what I want. Do you?

Stefan’s voice echoes in my head. I can close my eyes and see the way he looked at me when he said it. Not at me—throughme. He took one glance and knew it all, from the stress-bitten cuticles to the shamelessly reworn bra with the underwire that jabs me in the ribs every time I wriggle wrong.

My phone vibrates, and I’m so grateful for the distraction that I answer without checking the caller ID. Big mistake.

“Olivia, dear.” My mother’s voice slides through the speaker, too saccharine-sweet for my sour mood. “How are you?”

I blink, momentarily disoriented. My mother doesn’t call to ask how I am. She calls to inform me of fundraisers I should attend, connections I should make, or—most recently—how Walsh’s latest achievement has brought even more shame to my family name.

“I’m… fine. Is everything okay?” I straighten in my chair, immediately on alert.

“Can’t a mother call her daughter without an emergency?” She laughs. That’s weird in its own right—my mother would never lose control of herself enough to actually laugh. “I was thinking about you. How was your day?”