fourteen. The third lasted much longer.
They had already chosen a name.
Her voice broke as she spoke.
“Every time I told people I was pregnant, I eventually had to call them and explain that I wasn’t anymore,” she said. “I couldn’t keep doing it.”
Daniel said they had become terrified of hope, questions, and sympathy.
That was why they had chosen surrogacy and kept everything secret.
I understood their pain, but one question remained.
“Why did the nurse say that wasn’t the baby you left with?”
Daniel and Nora exchanged a frightened look.
Then Nora whispered, “Because the first baby you held wasn’t ours.”
I stared at her.
Daniel explained that the baby I had held belonged to another family in the next room.
Shortly before I arrived, that baby’s mother had suffered a serious medical emergency. The father rushed away with her, and the grandmother fainted in the
