Page 49 of The Surrogate Mother

Ican’t sleep.

I tried reading. I downloaded three separate books onto my Kindle, but none of them held my attention. I peed twice. I watched a few videos on YouTube, but I heard screen time is bad for sleep so I shut it off.

And that’s when I got out of bed and started pacing.

Unsurprisingly, this pulls Sam from sleep. He sits up in bed, rubbing his eyes and yawning. He turns on the lamp by the bed and stares at me in disbelief. “Abby, it’s two in the morning.”

“I can’t sleep.”

“Yeah, I gathered that.”

There was a stressful time I had at work four years ago, which coincided perfectly with the peak of our infertility issues. I had a lot of trouble sleeping then too. I’d routinely be up at two in the morning, pacing our bedroom.

I have to give it to Sam—he was great about it. He used to get up with me, and the two of us would sit in the kitchen together, talking and drinking warm milk. That’s how I knew he’d be a great dad to a newborn. He didn’t mindgetting up in the middle of the night to make me milk. And somehow, that made it even worse. Because I wanted a child not just for me, but also for him.

“I screwed up a meeting today at work,” I say, as I perch down at the edge of the bed. “A really important meeting. I put up the wrong images. It was a disaster.”

“Oh.” Sam rubs his eyes again. “So… what? Are you unemployed now?”

“No.”

“Then you’ll make it right again. You always do.”

“What if I don’t?”

He shrugs. “Well, we’re going to have a baby soon. You can stay home if you want.”

“You know I don’t want to do that! I’ve worked really hard to get where I am!” I put my hands on my hips. “Anyway, you don’t earn enough money on your own. We’d have to start going through my savings.”

“I earn enough for us to get by.”

“Not really.”

He gives me a look. Sam rarely seems resentful of the fact that I earn twice as much as he does or that we had to use my trust fund to put down money on our condo. But sometimes I get the feeling it bothers him more than he lets on.

In any case, this isn’t making me feel any better. I pace across our small bedroom, my heart pounding in my chest. Why can’t I shut down my thoughts? What’swrongwith me?

“Don’t you have those sleeping pills?” Sam says. “From when you were having trouble sleeping before?”

“Maybe…” I think they’re still in the medicine cabinet. “But they’re four years old. They’ve probably expired.”

He yawns. “Maybe tomorrow you should call your doctor to get another prescription.”

“I don’t want to rely on pills to sleep.”

“Yeah, you just want to spend the night pacing the apartment.”

He has a point. “Okay, I’ll call my doctor tomorrow.”

Sam rubs his eyes again. He looks so sexy right now, his dark hair disheveled, the stubble on his chin—also, he sleeps shirtless. So there’s that.

I can think ofonething that might relax me…

“Hey.” I climb back onto the bed, but this time onto Sam’s side. “You feel like fooling around…?”

“Uh…”

I frown at him. Is the answer not yes?