I handed our surrogate the keys to our guest house, believing everything was under control. For days, everything felt normal. Then on the third night, I woke at 1:30 a.m., reached for my husband, and he wasn’t there.
The guest house lights were on, and what I saw through the window disturbed me. I want to be clear about something before I say anything else: I was not a suspicious wife. Callen and I had been through enough together.
Seven years of trying. Five pregnancies that didn’t make it. My doctor finally sat me down and gently explained that my body couldn’t carry a baby to term.
That my uterus had simply been through too much. So Callen and I chose surrogacy. We found Elena through an agency, a 29-year-old woman who was calm and straightforward in her intake interview and had a warmth about her that I noticed immediately.
We moved her into our guest house, which sat just across the yard from our back door, close enough that I could bring her dinner without it getting cold. ***
The first few days were entirely normal. Appointments, check-ins, and the quiet rhythm of two households sharing a yard.
Then, on the third night, I woke up at 1:30 a.m., reached across the bed for Callen, and found nothing but cool sheets. I lay there for a moment, fully awake the way you get when something feels immediately wrong. Then I noticed the light.
The guest house windows were fully lit across the yard, warm and bright against the dark. Something about it pulled me upright before I’d made a conscious decision to move. I crossed the yard in bare feet, the grass cold and slightly damp, and the closer I got to those lit windows, the quieter everything seemed.
There was a narrow gap in the curtain on the side window. I looked through it. Elena was on the floor, kneeling.
And beside her, also on the floor, was Callen. They weren’t facing each other. They were both leaning over something between them, focused and close.
I couldn’t breathe right. Then Callen looked up, straight at the window, straight at me. I walked around to the door and went in.
Sitting on the floor between Elena and my husband was a small boy, about six years old, dark-haired, with one hand clutching his knee where a fresh scrape had torn through his pajama pants. Callen had a first-aid kit open beside him and was carefully pressing a bandage over the scrape. The boy looked at me with wide, cautious eyes.
The story doesn’t end here –
it continues on the next page.
TAP → NEXT PAGE → 👇
