1

WREN

“What do you mean, ‘You gave me the wrong sperm sample?’”

I can’t quite believe what I’m hearing. I take a look around the room to check my surroundings and confirm that this is in fact reality and not just some terrible, twisted, Häagen-Dazs-fueled nightmare.

Unfortunately for me, everything seems to be in order.

The placard on the wall reads SAEDER & BANKS FERTILITY CLINIC OF CHICAGO in a sleek, modern font. The fluorescent lights overhead sound like buzzing mosquitos, casting pale white light over every inch of the exam room. There’s not a speck of dust to be found. Normally, I’m the last person to complain about a clean room, but in this case, it’s just contributing to the sense that none of this is real life.

I pinch myself. It hurts.

Shit. Maybe this is real after all.

Dr. Saeder blinks down at me. Or up, rather. He’s perched on his gleaming black wheely stool and I’m sitting on the edge of the exam table with my feet dangling in the air like a naughty kid in the principal’s office. He looks like an ancient tortoise from this angle, all bristly nose hairs and beaked nose and bulbous eyes magnified to ridiculous proportions by his Coke bottle glasses.

He clears his throat and starts again. He’s one part weary and ten parts terrified that I’m about to sue his ass into the next dimension—which is reasonable, because I’m sure as hell considering it. “As I explained, Ms. Turner, there was a mix-up in the labeling system for donor samples at our offsite lab facility. At the intrauterine insemination stage of proceedings for a surrogacy pregnancy such as yours, the biological…”

He drones on and on, but I’m not really hearing him. I processed it the first time he explained things—well, processed it logically, at least. Emotionally, I’m light years away from coming to grips with the bombshell that the not-so-good doctor just dropped on me.

I’m pregnant with the wrong man’s baby.

There isn’t a therapist alive who’s qualified to deal with this ol’ satchel of trauma. Thanks a lot to the sperm clinic from hell.

It’s not like I didn’t have enough of the stuff already—trauma, that is, not sperm. When your sister and brother-in-law get viciously murdered a month before you’re supposed to start carrying their baby for them, you end up with enough baggage to last a lifetime.

Today was supposed to be a good day, dammit. Well, as good of a day as you can have in the immediate aftermath of a tragedy like the one that stole Rose and Jared from me. I was supposed to come in and get final confirmation that my eggs were properly fertilized. That the baby Rose had spent her entire life dreaming of would finally be hers, albeit not quite in the way she’d always imagined.

Rose was always the girlier of the two of us. She was the one directing her Barbies in theatrical performances and whipping up Easy Bake brownies for anyone who asked.

I’d have chugged orange juice and toothpaste before doing anything quite so feminine. While she was straightening doll hair, I was climbing trees and feeding those brownies of hers to any squirrel that would come close enough.

But we made it work, her and I. When Dad kicked us all out and Mom fell to cancer, we were all we had left. I came back home for the funeral and never really left Chicago after that.

It was good to be back near my sister. She understood how I grew up, all the little wounds to the heart that I suffered along the way to adulthood.

And I understood her just as well.

Which is why I was the first one she came to when she found out that the baby she’d always wanted so badly wasn’t ever going to be hers.

“I’m barren, Wren,” she’d said to me. I remember those words exactly because of how ridiculous they sounded. They belonged in a Jane Austen novel or in a cheesy grocery store checkout aisle bodice ripper.

Not on the lips of my sister.

Not on Rose.

But she didn’t need jokes then. She needed a hug—which is what I gave her in those first tear-drenched moments—and love, which is what I gave her in every second that followed.

She needed something else, too. It took her a while to work up the courage to ask me. But I’ll never forget that moment, either.

“Do it for me. Carry my baby. Will you, Wren?”

Back in the fluorescent-soaked present, I close my eyes to ward off the tears. I’ve cried enough in the last few weeks, thank you very much. This exact room has seen its fair share of those tears.

Even though things with the surrogacy have gone well—up until now—that doesn’t stop the sadness from sitting heavy on my chest, always ready to reach up and clamp my throat closed for a little while, just for shits and giggles.

Grief is a cruel, petty bitch.

“… you understand, Ms. Turner?” Dr. Saeder finishes. “Ms. Turner?”

I sigh and open my eyes again. There are three of him in my field of vision, blurred and split up by the unshed tears. When I blink, they coalesce back into one.

And at the sight of him, I get mad.

I don’t get mad often. For all that Rose was the princess of us two Turner girls, she was also the one more likely to melt down into a temper tantrum. And when she did, it was fierce.

“Hurricane Rosie,” my mom used to call it. “The forecast is rain and thunder—lots of it.”

Sure enough, she’d cry and scream like a storm cooked up by the devil himself. Hands pounding the ground, cheeks red and wet, the whole nine yards. She’d let her rage out like that—and when it was gone, it was like it had never even happened. She’d just smile again and go right back to her dolls.

Me, though… I turned my storms inwards. I kept ‘em close and buried ‘em deep. It felt safer that way.

But Hurricane Rosie isn’t ever coming back, is she? And after a lifetime of keeping the hatch closed on my own thunderstorms, I figure I’ve earned the right to let out a clap of lightning or two.

“What I understand, Dr. Saeder, is that you and your staff have made an incredibly serious mistake that is about to change the course of my life irreversibly,” I grit out, my voice wobbling dangerously.

Dr. Saeder’s eyes open wide and he scoots back a bit on his wheely stool like he wants to stay out of arm’s reach. Not a bad idea, honestly. There’s no telling what I might do next. “Now, Ms. Turner, I think ‘irreversibly’ is a bit of a strong word. There is always the option of ab⁠—”

“Don’t.”