Page 98 of The Surrogate Mother

I try to sit up in bed, but my head throbs. I lie back down again, knowing I’m going to be chained to this bed for at least another day. “Do you want him?”

“Of course I do.”

Of course he does.

He’s quiet for a moment. When he speaks again, his voice has a tinge of excitement: “Do you want to see a picture?”

I nod.

Sam whips out his cell phone and it takes him seconds to bring the image up on the screen. He holds his phone up for me, and I squint at the newborn baby on the screen.

He’s tiny. Painfully tiny and helpless and adorable, like the newborn I always dreamed of. He’s got oxygen prongs in his tiny nose and he’s wearing a white hat and sweater that are really small,yet still impossibly big on him. I can make out five perfect little fingers on his left hand.

“He looks like you,” I say to Sam.

I always thought it was ridiculous when people said babies look like adults. All babies look like old men. (Yet the converse isn’t true—old men don’t look like babies.) But actually, this baby really does look like Sam. Something about his nose and his lips.

“I thought so too.” He grins at me. “They let me hold him this morning. Just for a minute, but it was…”

He turns his head away. He’s trying not to get too excited. The mother of this child tried to murder us both, after all. But really, there’s only one right thing to do.

“I want him too,” I say.

Sam’s eyes light up. “Yeah?”

“Of course I do. He’s adorable, he’s beautiful, and he looks like you.”

I don’t say the last thing I’m thinking:And he doesn’t have a mother.

“As soon as you’re feeling better,” Sam says, “you have to come with me to see him. Okay?”

I can’t suppress a smile. “Okay.”

“Also…” He winks at me. “We have to come up with a name.”

Right. We get to choose a name for this baby that is now ours—we will be taking him home. Something that seemed like an impossible dream only days earlier.

“I’m so happy we finally have our child,” I sigh.

He nods. “I know what you mean.”

“This is what we wanted for so long.”

“Yeah…”

“It’s just… it’s hard to know we’re only getting him because his mother is dead.”

Sam is quiet. He has an odd expression on his face that’s making me uneasy.

“What?” I finally say.

He rubs at the back of his neck. “I never said Monica was dead.”

EPILOGUE

ONE YEAR LATER

David is learning to walk.