1. I SOLD MY BABY

🌹TESSA🌹

“The documents are complete and all bills have been paid.”

The man Raymond brought with him—I had decided he was a lawyer from the moment he walked in without introducing himself and opened his briefcase on the chair beside my bed like my hospital room was a conference table—slid the papers toward me without looking up.

“Please sign here, Ms Hart.”

I was still in the bed. They had not even given me a day. I had delivered this baby six hours ago and my body was still doing things I did not have the energy to think about and Raymond Reddington was standing at the foot of my bed in a suit watching me with the patience of someone who had somewhere else to be.

I looked at the papers. Then I looked at my son in the plastic hospital bassinet beside me. He was asleep. His chest was rising and falling in that fast shallow way that newborns breathe that had terrified me the first time I noticed it until the nurse explained it was normal. I had spent the last six hours learning him. The small sound he made when he was about to wake up. The way his face scrunched before he cried. The weight of him against my chest which was the only thing in the last several months that had felt like something solid to hold onto.

“Miss Hart.” The lawyer tapped the paper.

“Can I hold him?” My voice came out wrong, too thin, scraped out. “Just one more time. Please.”

Raymond moved for the first time since he walked in. He straightened, and the way he did it told me everything before he even opened his mouth.

“You have had nine months.” His voice was not raised. That was the thing about it, there was no anger in it, no discomfort, nothing that suggested this room smelled like antiseptic and new life and that there was a woman in a hospital bed in front of him who had pushed his son into the world six hours ago. “You hand over the child, you take the money, and you disappear. That was the agreement.”

I looked at him. I had been avoiding it since he walked in because every time I looked at him I saw the man from the club, the one who had laughed at something I said and ordered another drink and looked at me like I was worth looking at, and it made something in my stomach turn over in a way I could not afford right now.

He was not that man right now. That man had either never existed or he was buried so far under whatever this was that there was no point looking for him.

I picked up the pen. My hand was shaking and I did not try to stop it, there was no point. The signature that came out looked like it belonged to someone else but it was mine, it was legally mine, and the lawyer had the papers back in his briefcase before I had even put the pen down.

Raymond walked to the bassinet.

He stood over his son for a moment and I watched his face because I could not help it, I needed to see something there, I needed there to be something there. His jaw moved. His eyes stayed on the baby and for just a second, one single second, something shifted in his expression that I could not name.

Then he straightened and looked at the nurse who had appeared in the doorway and gave her a small nod.

She came in and reached into the bassinet and picked my son up and I felt the sound before I heard it, this low broken thing that came out of my throat that I had not given permission to come out.

“Please.” I pushed myself up in the bed and everything in my body screamed at me to stop moving but I kept going. “Please just treat him well. Please make sure he knows…please just —”

“It would be in your best interest to relocate, Miss Hart.” The lawyer was closing his briefcase, his voice pleasant in the way that people make their voices pleasant when what they are actually doing is warning you. “Far from here. The terms you signed are comprehensive but distance is the simplest protection for all parties. The public must not hear of this.” He clicked the briefcase shut. “I trust you don’t need me to explain the consequences for breaching the contract.”

The nurse walked out with my son.

Raymond followed without turning around. Without slowing down his strides.

The lawyer followed Raymond.

The door swung shut.

The click of it went through my sternum like something had been nailed into place.

I did not move. I sat there with the pen still loose in my fingers and my eyes on the door and my body doing this thing where it forgot how to breathe properly, where the air kept coming in shallow and not going all the way down, and the bassinet was right there beside me, still rocking slightly from where the nurse had lifted him out of it, still warm, I could see the small indent his body had made in the mattress and I could not stop staring at it.

My chest tightened in a way that wasn’t just pain. It was something sharper, something that spread from behind my ribs until my hands started tingling and my throat closed up. I pressed the back of my wrist against my mouth because I knew that if I made a sound, I wouldn’t be able to stop.

The hospital kept going. That was the thing that was making it worse somehow, that the hospital just kept going. Footsteps in the hallway. A machine beeping somewhere down the corridor in a slow steady rhythm. A voice on an intercom, calm and professional, calling a name that was not mine. All of it completely ordinary. All of it completely unbothered by what had just happened in this room.

The envelope the lawyer had left on my bedside table had my name printed on it in clean precise letters. Tessa Hart. Like I was a vendor being paid for a service rendered. Like that was all this had been.

I pressed my back against the headboard and I pulled my knees up as far as my body would let me and I wrapped my arms around myself and I sat there with the sound of my own breathing too loud in my ears and I looked at that bassinet.

The indent where he had been lying was still there. That small curved shape of him pressed into the mattress.

I had counted his fingers. Both hands, twice, because I needed to be sure. I had turned his tiny fist over in my palm and looked at every knuckle and every nail and I had pressed my lips to his forehead and breathed him in and I had thought, I had actually thought, that maybe I could do this, maybe there was a version of this where I walked out of this hospital with him and figured the rest out as I went.

But I had nowhere to go. I had no one. I had signed the papers because the alternative was bringing a baby into nothing, into less than nothing, and I had told myself it was the right decision, the only decision, I had told myself that every single day for the last four months since I agreed to Raymond’s terms and I had almost believed it.

The room blurred. My chest pulled in on itself and my throat closed and the tears that ran down my face were hot and I did not wipe them away, I just let them come, let them fall onto the hospital gown that still had my son’s smell on it, this warm milky new smell that I was already terrified of forgetting.

I just sold my baby.

The money was sitting on my bedside table in a cream envelope with my name on it and my baby was in a hallway getting further away from me with every second and I had let it happen, I had signed my name and let it happen.

Because I had nothing. Because Tessa Hart who had grown up with everything had somehow ended up alone in a hospital room with empty arms and an envelope full of money and not a single person in the world who was coming through that door for her.

How did I get here?