Chapter 3

I couldn't stop researching.

For three days, I barely slept. My laptop became an extension of my body, open on every surface of my apartment—kitchen counter, bathroom floor, the pillow beside my head at 3 a.m. The morning sickness was relentless, but I pushed through it, wiping my mouth and returning to the screen with the determination of someone excavating a grave.

Natalie Ashford. Née Natalie Chen. Married Dominic at twenty-three. No social media presence after 2019. No obituary. No divorce filing in any Texas county I could access.

She simply stopped existing.

The sealed lawsuit was a wall I couldn't climb, but the fragments I found around it painted a disturbing picture. A neighbor's blog post from 2020 mentioned "that poor Ashford woman" and "the sounds coming from the house at night." A local reporter's Twitter thread, now deleted but cached by the Wayback Machine, referenced "allegations of coercive control" before abruptly ending with: "Legal counsel has advised me to retract my previous statements regarding the Ashford family."

Someone had paid to make Natalie disappear from the public record.

I sat back in my chair, one hand on my stomach, and felt the baby—Dominic and Claire's baby—flutter for the first time. The sensation was so delicate, so impossibly tender, that tears sprang to my eyes before I could stop them.

This child was innocent. Whatever darkness surrounded its father, whatever secrets Claire was blind to, this tiny heartbeat had done nothing wrong.

But I needed to know what I was walking into.

The agency coordinator, Lisa, answered on the third ring. "Maren! How are you feeling? The Ashfords said dinner went beautifully."

"Lisa, I have a question about the intended father's background check."

A pause. "All our intended parents undergo thorough screening—"

"Was Dominic Ashford previously married?"

The silence that followed was louder than any answer.

"Maren," Lisa said carefully, "I'm not at liberty to discuss the private histories of our clients. What I can tell you is that every intended parent in our program meets the highest standards of—"

"His first wife vanished, Lisa. There are sealed court records. I need to know if my safety—"

"Your safety is our top priority." Her voice had shifted to damage-control mode. "If you're feeling uncomfortable, we can arrange a meeting with our counselor—"

"I don't need a counselor. I need the truth."

"The truth is that Dominic Ashford passed every background check, psychological evaluation, and home study we require. His previous marriage ended in divorce. That's all I can share."

Divorce. But I'd searched every county database in Texas. There was no divorce filing.

"Thank you, Lisa," I said, and hung up before she could offer more rehearsed reassurances.

That afternoon, I drove to the county clerk's office myself. The woman behind the counter was sympathetic but unhelpful—sealed records required a court order to access, and I had no legal standing to request one.

I was walking back to my car when my phone buzzed. A text from an unknown number:

"Stop digging into Dominic. You don't know what he's capable of."

I froze in the parking lot, the Texas heat pressing down on me like a hand. My thumbs hovered over the keyboard.

"Who is this?"

Three dots appeared. Disappeared. Appeared again.

"Someone who carried his baby before you."

The world tilted. I leaned against my car, breathing hard, the phone trembling in my grip.

"Natalie?"

No response. The dots vanished. I waited five minutes, ten, twenty—standing in the blistering sun, sweat running down my back, staring at a screen that refused to give me more.

When I finally drove home, I checked every mirror obsessively, half-expecting to see a black sedan trailing me. My apartment felt smaller when I locked the door behind me, the walls closer, the shadows deeper.

I opened my laptop and created a new folder. I named it "Insurance."

Into it went everything—the cached blog posts, the deleted Twitter thread, screenshots of the sealed lawsuit, the anonymous text messages, and a detailed timeline of every interaction I'd had with Dominic and Claire since discovering their identities.

Then I copied the folder to a flash drive, sealed it in an envelope, and drove to Eleanor's apartment. Eleanor—my coworker at the diner, the closest thing I had to a friend in this city.

"If anything happens to me," I said, pressing the envelope into her hands, "take this to the police."

Eleanor's eyes widened. "Maren, what the hell is going on?"

"I can't explain yet. Just promise me."

She studied my face, reading the fear I couldn't hide. "I promise."

That night, I lay in bed with both hands on my stomach, feeling the tiny movements of a life caught between secrets. The anonymous texter's words played on loop in my mind: Someone who carried his baby before you.

Not his wife. His surrogate.

Which meant Natalie wasn't Dominic's first wife who disappeared.

She was his first surrogate.

And if she was warning me, it meant she'd survived whatever Dominic had done.

The question that kept me awake until dawn was simple and terrifying: What happened to the baby?