Elara

I didn’t sleep that night. I lay on my back staring at the ceiling until the numbers stopped meaning anything, and by morning I’d made a decision I wasn’t proud of. I told myself I was only going to look.

The agency had no sign on the street. Just a private elevator that needed a code from the card itself, and a waiting room upstairs done entirely in white. I sat there in my one good coat until a woman in a pale blue uniform called my name.

“Miss Vance.” She had a clipboard and a tight smile. “This way.”

The intake room was smaller, more clinical. She took my blood pressure, asked about my health history. She then set  her pen down and looked at me properly for the first time.

“You’re an omega.”

“I don’t see how that’s relevant.”

“It’s very relevant.” She came closer and inhaled once, slow, and something shifted in her face. “Suppressed. That’s unusual. Most omegas your age haven’t figured out how to do that on their own.”

I didn’t answer, because I didn’t know how to explain it. I’d been suppressing my scent since I was fourteen, since a boy at school told me omegas were only good for one thing and I decided I’d rather disappear than prove him right.

She excused herself and left me alone for eleven minutes. I counted them on the clock above the door. When she came back, she wasn’t alone.

“Miss Vance, I’m Dr. Reyes.” The older woman who followed her in had a calm voice and folded her hands as she sat. “I understand you’re here about the surrogacy program.”

“I’m here to ask questions. I haven’t agreed to anything.”

“Of course.” She nodded. “Let me be honest with you, since I think you’d rather I was. This particular placement isn’t standard. The client is what we call a priority match. High compensation, full medical care, complete anonymity on both sides. You’d never meet him. He’d never know your name unless you chose to reveal it.”

My throat went dry. “How much compensation?”

She told me the number, and for a moment the room actually tilted.

It was enough. Not just enough to cover the debt Silas kept inventing new figures for. Enough to be free of him entirely, to move Sophie somewhere he couldn’t reach, to breathe again for the first time since Dad’s funeral.

“There has to be a catch,” I said.

“There’s a contract. Thorough, binding, and yes, strict.” Dr. Reyes didn’t blink. “You’d carry the child to term. You’d have no parental claim once he’s born. No contact with the father unless he initiates it. In exchange, you’d be housed and cared for throughout, with resources most surrogates never see.”

“He,” I repeated. “You said he. You know something about the father.”

“I know very little. Only that he’s particular.” She paused. “And that for reasons I’m not privy to, he asked for your file specifically, before you’d even finished the intake exam.”

That stopped me cold. “That’s not possible. I only submitted my information yesterday.”

“I’m simply telling you what I was told.” She slid a folder across the table, thick with pages I hadn’t agreed to read yet. “You don’t have to decide today. But I’d encourage you not to wait too long. Placements like this don’t stay open.”

I looked down at the folder without touching it, my pulse loud in my own ears. Somewhere out there was a man who had picked me out of a stack of strangers before he’d ever laid eyes on me, and somewhere behind me was Silas, waiting for me to run out of other options.

I thought of Sophie’s light still burning when I walked home each night, doing homework alone because I was too tired to help her with it anymore. I thought of the eviction notice nailed to our door.

“I need to think,” I said, though some part of me had already decided the moment I heard the number.

Dr. Reyes nodded like she’d expected exactly that answer. “Take the folder home. Read it carefully.” She stood, smoothing her coat. “For what it’s worth, Miss Vance, I don’t think this is a mistake for you. I think it might be the only door left open.”

I walked out with the folder under my arm, hands shaking the whole way down in the elevator, and I didn’t stop until I was standing outside Sophie’s school, watching her come out with her friends, laughing at something, unaware that her entire life might soon be paid for by a stranger who already knew my name before I knew his.

She spotted me across the yard and jogged over, backpack bouncing against her shoulder. “Why are you here? You’re never here.”

“Wanted to walk you home for once.”

“Okay, weird, but okay.” She fell into step beside me, chattering about a math test she thought she’d failed and a girl in her class who’d gotten in trouble for something dramatic I only half followed. I let her talk. It was easier than thinking about the folder pressing against my ribs through my bag.

“You’re quiet,” she said eventually, when we were two blocks from home. “You’re always quiet when something’s wrong.”

“Nothing’s wrong.”

“Elara.”

“I’m handling it.” I meant it to sound reassuring. It came out tired instead.

Sophie stopped walking. “Is it the debt thing? The man who came to the door?”

My stomach dropped. “You heard that?”

“I heard enough.” Her chin lifted, the same stubborn tilt our father used to get right before he refused to back down from something. “I’m not a little kid. If we’re about to lose the apartment, I want to know.”

I looked at her for a long moment, fifteen years old and trying so hard to be braver than she had any reason to be at that age, and something in my chest ached with how much I wanted to protect her from all of it.

“We’re not losing the apartment,” I said. “I found a way to fix things. It’s just going to take a little time to sort out.”

“What kind of way?”

“The boring kind. Paperwork. Adult stuff.” I forced a smile I didn’t feel. “Don’t worry about it. That’s my job, not yours.”

She studied me the way she always did when she suspected I was lying, weighing whether it was worth the fight to push further. In the end she let it go, mostly because she wanted to believe me as much as I wanted her to.

“Okay,” she said. “But if you need help with anything. Actual help, not the kind where you pretend everything’s fine. I’m right here.”

“I know.”

We walked the rest of the way in a comfortable silence, and when we got home I sent her upstairs to start her homework while I sat at the kitchen table with the folder open in front of me. Page after page of clauses and terms, medical disclosures, confidentiality agreements written in language dense enough that I had to read some sentences three times before they made sense.

Buried on the fourth page was a line that made me stop entirely.

The intended father reserves the right to review candidate files directly and select a surrogate outside standard agency matching procedures, subject to full confidentiality on both parties.

So he had chosen me. Not the agency, not some algorithm matching health records and genetics. Him.

I thought about what Dr. Reyes had said, that he’d requested my file before I’d even finished the exam, and a small, uneasy feeling settled low in my stomach, something between curiosity and dread. I didn’t know his name. I didn’t know his face. And yet somewhere in this city, a man I’d never met had looked at a folder with my name on it and decided he wanted me specifically.

I closed the folder and pressed my palms flat against the table, steadying myself.

Whatever this was, I was going to sign it. Not because I trusted it, and not because I wasn’t afraid.

Because for the first time since my father died, someone had offered me a way out that didn’t have Silas’s name attached to it, and I was too tired, too cornered, and too desperate to ask myself what it might cost me later.