Chapter 1

The cry came first, thin and furious, and for one shining second Dorcas Starling forgot

every hour of pain.

“Is he breathing?” She pushed up on her elbows, hair plastered to her forehead. “Is he

okay? Please, let me hold him.”

“A healthy boy,” the doctor said. He did not look at her. He looked at the door.

A nurse wrapped the baby in a white blanket and carried him across the room before

Dorcas could lift her arms. She did not pause. She did not look back.

“Wait.” Dorcas’s voice cracked. “One minute. I only want to see his face.”

Nobody answered. The monitor beside her kept beeping, steady, as if nothing had

changed.

Her phone lay face-up on the bedside table. She had texted her father at dawn and again

at noon. Delivered, not read. Her stepmother and stepbrother hadn’t replied at all.

Nine months of humming her mother’s lullaby to him through her skin. Nine months of

folding tiny yellow clothes. And she had not even seen his face.

The door swung open and her heart lifted. Isaiah. Isaiah, who had held her hand

through eleven hours of labour and stepped out twenty minutes ago to “get some air.”

Her fiancé.

But he was not alone.

Emily walked in beside him in a fitted red dress and heels, hair blown out, lipstick

perfect. Emily, who was supposed to be at home in bed, pale and weak, waiting for her

next transfusion. Emily, whose hands had shaken so badly last month that Dorcas had

cut up her dinner for her.“Emily?” Dorcas stared. “What are you doing out of bed? You shouldn’t be walking

around, your levels—”

“Don’t.” Emily rolled her eyes. “You sound like a nurse.”

She crossed the room and took the baby from the nurse’s arms as if she had done it a

hundred times. She tucked him against her shoulder.

Dorcas stopped breathing. “Why do you have him?”

“Because he’s mine.”

The words made no sense. Dorcas looked at Isaiah, waiting for him to laugh, to correct

it.

Isaiah checked his watch.

“Isaiah.” Dorcas’s voice shook. “Tell her to give him back.”

“Lower your voice,” he said, not looking up.

“He’s my son.”

“He’s a legal matter now.”

“I was never sick, Dorcas,” Emily said. She sounded almost bored. “Not one day.”

“That’s not— I gave you my blood. Fourteen times.”

“Fourteen?” Emily smiled. “I lost count.” She turned her foot to show off a new heel.

“Isaiah bought these last week. Do you like them?”

Dorcas looked at her bare arm, smooth and unmarked, and realized she had never once

seen a bruise there. She had been too busy being grateful to notice.

“The donations kept you tired and busy,” Isaiah said, in the flat, patient voice he used on

waiters who got his order wrong. “A woman worried about her friend doesn’t ask

questions about her own treatment. It was the simplest way to keep you cooperative.”Dorcas thought of every Saturday in that clinic chair, a needle in her arm and a paper

cup of orange juice, smiling across the room at her best friend.

“The baby,” she whispered.

“Is ours. Mine and Emily’s.” Isaiah finally looked at her. There was nothing in his face.

No guilt. No warmth. “You were the surrogate. The paperwork is in order. There will be

a payment for your trouble, as long as you stay quiet.”

“A payment.” Dorcas repeated it as if it were a foreign word. “You told me he was ours.”

“You were told what you needed to hear.”

“I never signed anything.”

“You’ll find that you did.”

Emily lifted the edge of the blanket and peered inside. “He has Isaiah’s eyes,” she said,

and smiled at Dorcas. “Lucky for him, he got nothing from you.”

A tiny fist had worked its way free of the blanket. Dorcas stared at it, and could not make

her lungs work.

Dorcas tried to sit up and her body screamed. “You’re lying. We were getting married in

the spring—”

The nurse stared at the floor. The doctor studied his clipboard. Nobody in the room was

going to help her. She was on her own.

“Dorcas.” Isaiah sighed, the way you sigh at a child who won’t stop crying. “Go home to

your father’s house. Rest. Be sensible.”

Dorcas laughed once. “My father didn’t even come today. Nobody did. I told Michael it

was today. I texted Laura.”

“Exactly,” Isaiah said. “Nobody is coming for you. Nobody ever has.”

It landed like a second labour, deeper than the first.She looked at Emily’s hand, the hand that had held hers through every transfusion,

curved around the back of her son’s head.

Her voice came out very quiet. “How long?”

Isaiah frowned. “What?”

“How long have you been sleeping with her?”

Emily laughed. “Since before the engagement.” She tilted her head. “You really never

noticed?”

“Give me my son.”

Dorcas swung her legs off the bed. The room swayed. Her stitches pulled, and she did

not care. She took one step, then another, and caught Emily’s wrist. Emily jerked free

and wiped the spot on her dress, as if Dorcas were dirty.

“Give him to me. Give me my son, you liars—”

“Dorcas, stop.”

“GIVE HIM TO ME!”

Isaiah moved so fast she never saw it coming. His palm cracked across her face. She

spun sideways, her hip hit the bed rail, and the floor rushed up to meet her. Pain burst

behind her eyes.

Somewhere far away, the baby began to cry again. She thought of the lullaby. Someone

has to hum it to him.

The cry faded down the corridor until the monitor’s beeping was all she could hear.

Her fingers slid through something warm on the cold tiles.

Heels clicked away. A door opened.

“Get her out of my sight,” Isaiah said, and he was no longer speaking to her. “And make

sure there’s no record she was ever pregnant.”Then everything went black before she could answer.