All Chapters of The Surrogate's Heart : Chapter 1 - Chapter 10

Five years earlier, Aria had believed that loving someone meant showing up for them even when it cost her everything. She met Max when she was twenty-three, fresh out of college and still hungry for the kind of stability she'd never had as a child. He was charming then, attentive in a way that made her feel like the only person in a crowded room, and for a while that attention felt like proof that she had finally outrun the life she came from. Her mother died when Aria was eight, and two years later her father followed, leaving her to grow up in an orphanage where nobody held you when you cried and nothing was given to you for free. She learned early that love was not something owed to her. It was something she had to earn, or build, or hold onto with both hands before it slipped away again.When Max lost his job three years into their marriage and the resentment in him started to curdle, Aria simply worked harder to hold their life together. She paid the rent and the bills and the gr

Aria arrived at St. Catherine's Orphanage on a gray Tuesday in October, ten years old and already certain the world was not a kind place.She stood in the entryway clutching a small bag that held everything she owned, a few worn clothes, a faded photograph of a mother she barely remembered, and a stuffed rabbit missing one ear. Her shoes were too small, and her coat was too thin, and she kept her eyes fixed on the floor while Sister Margaret, a stern woman with a pinched face, announced to the room that Aria would be staying with them from now on and asked a girl named Bella to show her to her room.Bella had warm brown eyes and dark curly hair pulled into a messy ponytail, and she carried herself with a confidence Aria envied instantly. She led Aria to a small, cramped room with two bunk beds and pointed to the bottom one on the left, telling her that was hers now, that Bella slept just above her, and that she wouldn't have to be scared alone at night because someone was right there.

Colton did not believe in love anymore, and he had the proof to back it up. Years earlier, the woman he'd planned to marry had walked into his penthouse, told him she'd ended a pregnancy he hadn't even known about, and walked back out without a single tear or a moment's hesitation. He remembered the exact quality of the afternoon light in the room that day, the way her heels had clicked down the hallway afterward, the way he'd stood frozen and silent while the only future he'd let himself imagine dissolved in front of him. He spent months afterward trying to find the warning signs he must have missed, replaying every tender moment between them, and never found a single one. She had seemed to love him completely, right up until the moment she proved she hadn't.After that, he buried himself in work, because numbers didn't lie and contracts didn't walk out on you without warning. He built his company into an empire that spanned three cities and was pushing into a fourth, working eightee

The first few days at the villa passed quietly while Aria learned the rhythm of a house built for people who had never had to think about grocery lists or unpaid bills. Emma, the head housekeeper, turned out to be the easiest person in the building to talk to, a warm, sharp-eyed woman in her fifties who insisted on calling her Miss until Aria finally talked her down to just Aria, and who mentioned once, gently, that she'd take very good care of her since she was carrying the young master. The maids were polite but distant, the marble floors and museum-quality art still made Aria feel like she was trespassing in someone else's life, and Colton himself was nowhere to be found for two full days, which left her equal parts relieved and unaccountably disappointed. She found his study by accident on the second afternoon, drawn in by a door left open and a wall of floor-to-ceiling shelves that turned out to be packed with everything from history and philosophy to battered paperback novels t

Aria was six months along now, her bump impossible to hide and no longer something she wanted to, and her colleagues had started talking about it openly enough that she couldn't avoid hearing them. By the water cooler one afternoon, Marcy was loudly speculating that it had to be Max's baby, that they'd been together forever, while someone else pointed out that Max had never had the kind of money that could afford the driver and the car that dropped Aria off every morning. Aria had gotten good at ignoring things over the years, so she clocked in, did her work, and clocked out without offering anyone an explanation she didn't owe them.She was crossing the parking lot toward the car that afternoon, her mind already on dinner, when a hand closed around her arm hard enough to bruise and yanked her backward. Max's face was twisted and red, spit flying as he demanded to know how she could be this far along only months after their separation, accusing her of cheating throughout their entire