Chapter 1

The satisfsatisfaction of seeing two pink lines faded the satisfecond I satisfaw his face on the clinic wall.

I was twenty-six, broke, and eight weeks pregnant with a stranger's baby for $80,000. The "intended father" had been anonymous—just a file number, a medical history, a signed contract. No names. No faces. That was the whole point.

But the photo on Dr. Levinson's desk changed everything.

It was a candid shot—a man in a charcoal suit with his arm around a woman at some charity gala. He was handsome in that sharp, moneyed way that made you trust him and fear him simultaneously. She was radiant, her auburn hair swept up, her smile wide and genuine.

I knew that smile. I'd grown up beside it. I'd braided the hair above it. I'd cried into the shoulder beneath it on the night our mother's coffin was lowered into red Georgia clay.

The woman in the photo was my sister. My estranged older sister, Claire, who had married rich and vanished from my life seven years ago without so much as a forwarding address.

Which meant the baby growing inside me—the one I'd agreed to carry for a fee because I couldn't make rent—belonged to her husband.

My hand moved instinctively to my stomach. The room tilted.

"Ms. Bellamy?" Dr. Levinson looked up from her paperwork. "Your vitals look excellent. The intended parents are thrilled with the progress."

"The intended parents," I repeated, my voice hollow. "They're... happy?"

"Ecstatic. Mr. Ashford has been calling daily for updates." She smiled warmly. "You're giving them the greatest gift imaginable."

Mr. Ashford. I filed the name away like a blade slipped into a sheath.

"When do I meet them?" I asked, keeping my expression neutral despite the earthquake behind my ribs.

"Per the contract, the first face-to-face is scheduled for week twelve. But Mr. Ashford has requested an earlier introduction—he's very involved." She paused. "Would you be comfortable with that?"

Comfortable. I was carrying my brother-in-law's child in a womb he'd rented, for a sister who didn't know I existed anymore. Comfortable had left the building.

"Of course," I said. "I'd love to meet them."

I walked to my car on legs that didn't feel like mine. The Texas sun hammered the parking lot, heat shimmering off asphalt, but I was cold—freezing from the inside out.

Seven years of silence. Seven years since Claire had looked me in the eye at our mother's funeral and said, "I can't carry your problems anymore, Maren. I need to live my own life." Then she'd climbed into a black town car and disappeared into a world of country clubs and cocktail parties, leaving me with Mom's medical debt and a two-bedroom apartment I couldn't afford alone.

Now fate—or something crueler—had threaded our lives back together through blood and contract law and a baby neither of us had planned for.

I sat in my car, engine off, hands shaking on the steering wheel. The surrogacy agency had promised anonymity. They'd promised safety. They'd promised this would be simple.

But nothing about carrying your sister's husband's baby was simple.

And the question burning through me like acid wasn't why Claire couldn't carry her own child—it was why, in seven years of living in the same city, she had never once tried to find me.

My phone buzzed. A text from the agency coordinator: "Great news! The Ashfords want to meet this Saturday. Dinner at their home. Car will pick you up at 6."

Their home. Claire's home. The home she'd built with the man whose child was now dividing and multiplying inside me, cell by cell, heartbeat by heartbeat.

I typed back: "I'll be ready."

Then I pressed my forehead against the steering wheel and let the first sob tear through me—not for myself, but for the sister I'd lost and the secret I now carried in more ways than one.