The surrogate wife

CHAPTER ONE

Mara's Pov 

"You have to sign the birthday card, Lily. We don't just draw a cat on it and call it done."

"But the cat is the present."

"The cat is a drawing of a cat."

"A good drawing."

I looked down at my three-year-old, who was holding a crayon with the seriousness of a surgeon and absolutely zero intention of writing her name. The birthday card for her daycare teacher was now mostly an orange cat. There was barely a corner left for anything else.

"Fine," I said. "Help me write your name right here. This tiny space."

"L," she said, pressing the crayon down so hard it almost tore through. "I. L. Y."

Close enough.

I sealed the envelope before she could add another cat, packed her lunch, wrestled her into her jacket, and had us out the door by seven forty-three. Seven minutes behind my personal target. Not bad for a Tuesday.

This was my life and I had made peace with it.

That's not me being dramatic. I mean it genuinely. I was thirty-two years old, a junior partner at Hargrove and Sloane, the legal guardian of a three-year-old who drew cats on everything, and I had not been on a date since the Obama administration. But I had a routine that worked. I had a daughter, not biologically, not legally in the strictest sense, but mine in every way that mattered — and I had a job I was good at, and I had an apartment with enough counter space to actually cook, which I had learned to value more than I ever expected.

I had built something steady out of something that should have broken me.

Most days, I didn't let myself think too hard about how it started. The pregnancy, the phone call, the hospital. The way Elias Voss had stood in the hallway of the maternity ward looking like a man who had already left his body and was only staying out of obligation. The conversation we had in that hallway, which lasted maybe twelve minutes and rearranged the entire rest of my life.

He'd said, I can't do this. Not cruelly. Just honestly, in the way that people are honest when they're too exhausted to be anything else.

And I'd said, Then I will.

We didn't do paperwork. We didn't call lawyers, which is funny given that I am one. We just made an agreement the way people make agreements when they are too deep in grief to think about consequences. He would go. I would stay. Lily would be mine.

For three years, he kept his word. And so did I.

****************

I was reviewing a deposition summary when my phone rang at six-seventeen that evening. Unknown number, but local. I let it go to voicemail, finished the paragraph I was on, and listened to the message.

Nothing. Just someone who'd hung up.

I forgot about it immediately.

Lily and I had dinner. She ate approximately four bites of pasta and then announced she was full, which I knew meant she would appear at my bedside at ten p.m. requesting crackers. We read two books. I gave her a bath during which she flooded the bathroom mat, which is a nightly occurrence and I have simply accepted it as a feature of existence. I tucked her in. She asked me to sing the song.

I sang the song. It's not a real song. It's something I made up in the hospital the night she was born, when I didn't know what else to do and she wouldn't stop crying. It doesn't have a proper melody or real lyrics. But she loves it the way children love things that belong only to them, and I have never told anyone it exists.

I turned off her light, poured myself a glass of wine, and sat on the couch with the deposition summary still open on my laptop.

The knock came at seven fifty-two.

I wasn't expecting anyone. My neighbor Rosa sometimes came by to return things she'd borrowed, but she texted first. My mother called, never visited. My closest friends had all learned to schedule themselves in advance because I was the kind of person whose schedule required advance scheduling.

I looked through the peephole.

The man on the other side of my door was someone I had not seen in three years. He was taller than I remembered, or maybe I had just spent three years not thinking about his height. He was wearing a jacket that had seen better days and he was standing with the posture of someone who had rehearsed this moment and then abandoned the rehearsal entirely.

Elias Voss.

I stood at the door for a full ten seconds without moving.

He knocked again, softer this time, like he was already apologizing.

I thought about not answering. I thought about calling my lawyer, thought about the fact that I was a lawyer. I thought about Lily asleep in the next room with a crayon still faintly visible on her left hand despite the bath.

Then I opened the door.

He looked at me, and whatever he had planned to say first, he didn't say it. He just looked at me the way people look when they have been carrying something alone for a very long time and have finally, reluctantly, arrived at the place they should have come to sooner.

"I wouldn't be here," he said, "if I had any other option."

I kept my hand on the door. "That's not a great opening, Elias."

"I know." He exhaled. "My mother is dying. She has six months, maybe less. And the only thing she has asked me for—" He stopped. Swallowed. "She wants to meet Lily."

I looked at him for a long moment.

"You should have called first."

"I called," he said. "You didn't pick up."