* Three years ago *
The Thornbury Surrogacy Centre smelled like lavender and legal liability. Two scent diffusers flanked the reception desk, working overtime to mask the fact that this was a place where women signed their bodies over in triplicate.
I sat in the consultation room with my hands folded over a belly that had stopped being mine around week twelve. Janet Kessler finished reading my file, closed the folder, and smiled—the specific smile she’s probably trained for.
"Everything looks excellent, Cora. Blood pressure is perfect, the baby is measuring right on track. You're thirty-seven weeks tomorrow."
"I know." I shifted in the chair, which was designed for women significantly less pregnant than me. "I've been counting."
"I'm sure you have." She opened a second folder—thicker, with coloured tabs. "This is our final check-in before delivery, so I want to walk through the post-delivery process and get a few signatures."
"More signatures." I eyed the stack. "I've signed more documents in the last nine months than most people do buying a house."
Janet pulled a pen from the ceramic cup on her desk—the cup had a cartoon stork on it, because someone in this building had a sense of humour I wanted to study under a microscope. She clicked the pen once and squared the paperwork between us.
"Let's start with the delivery plan. Private suite at Royal Marsden, seventh floor—the intended parents have arranged and paid for everything."
"And I won't see them." My thumb traced a slow circle on my knee. "That's per the agreement and per my own request."
"Correct. Post-delivery, the baby will be placed briefly for initial skin contact, which is standard, and then transferred to the nursing team." She paused, watching me the way she always did at these checkpoints.
"You've been very clear about your boundaries from the start," she continued. "No name selection, no updates post-placement."
"No name, no photos, no forwarding address." I ticked each one off with my fingers. "Same answer as months one through eight, Janet."
She leaned forward slightly, pen still resting against her lip. "Can I ask you something off-script?"
"Most of our surrogates start adjusting their boundaries around this stage—wanting a photo, asking about the family. You haven't adjusted once, and I want to make sure that's strength and not suppression."
My jaw worked once before I answered. "My sister is thirteen. Our father drinks his disability cheques and I waitress five nights a week."
"I'm aware of your circumstances." Janet's hands folded over the file. "I'm asking about the emotional side."
"The emotional side is that I made rules on day one and I've kept them." I held her gaze until she blinked first. "I don't imagine who this baby becomes. I don't pick names in the shower."
"He isn't mine now and he won't be mine tomorrow. That's not suppression—it's arithmetic."
"Blythe's medical costs." Janet said it gently, not as a question. "The compensation covers what your other work doesn't."
"It covers the difference between her diagnosis staying treatable and becoming the thing that killed our mother." My voice came out flat, factual—the only way I could say it without the words growing teeth. "So yes. I'm here because the numbers make sense."
The lavender diffuser cycled on in the quiet. Janet studied me for a long moment, then uncapped her pen and slid the first document across the desk.
"This confirms your consent to terminate parental rights upon delivery." She turned to the second page. "And this is the final payment authorisation—funds transferred within forty-eight hours."
I signed each page where her slender fingers with a French manicure pointed. The pen was heavy, expensive—the kind they gave you when the thing you were signing was worth more than your annual income.
"Last one." Janet placed the final sheet in front of me. "Acknowledgment that you will not seek to identify the intended parents, and that they won't receive identifying information about you."
I signed it without pausing. Janet gathered the papers and looked at me over the top of them, and her professional warmth slipped just enough to show the person underneath.
"Are you ready, Cora?" She asked it the way someone asks when they already know the answer might be a lie.
My hand rested on the curve of my belly. Underneath, something turned—a slow roll, a heel or an elbow pressing against my palm like a question I wasn't going to answer. I looked at Janet and nodded.
Sixteen days later, I learned that ready was a word I'd used too confidently, sitting in a lavender room with a stork-printed mug and a stack of papers that weighed nothing at all.
The delivery room at Royal Marsden was white and bright and efficient. Twelve hours of labour compressed into fragments—my fingers crushing the bed rail, a nurse saying almost there every half an hour, the overhead light buzzing at a frequency only a woman in active labour could hear.
Then—sound. A cry that was enormous for something that small, filling the room to its corners, and every muscle in my body went slack at once.
"Healthy boy." The doctor's voice came from somewhere behind the glare of the surgical light. "Eight pounds, four ounces."
They placed him on my chest for the standard skin contact—sixty seconds, maybe ninety. He was warm and furious and impossibly real, fists clenched against my collarbone like he had grievances to file.
Dark hair, slicked and wild. When his eyes opened—green, my green, the exact shade that looked back at me in every mirror and out of Blythe's face across every kitchen table.
Below his left ear, a crescent mark curved against the skin—small, deliberate, like someone had pressed a thumbnail into clay. The same mark I had, the same my mother carried, the same Blythe wore under her hair where only I ever thought to look.
I memorised him the way you memorise a room you're about to leave forever—every angle, every shadow, the specific weight of him against my sternum. My finger traced the edge of his ear, barely touching, and then the nurse was there.
Gentle, practised hands lifting him away. My arms stayed exactly where they were, curved around the shape of him in empty air.
I signed the final papers down the hall with a cheap pen from a nurse's station. Ninety percent of the payment routed to the account I'd opened for Blythe—the one she thought was a college fund, the one keeping her diagnosis on the right side of treatable.
A taxi waited outside in the February dark, barely dawn, the kind of cold that found every gap in your coat. I sat in the back seat and pressed my palms flat against my thighs to stop the shaking.
I would never need to know his name. I would never need to see his face again, or wonder whether those green eyes stayed green or changed the way some babies' did.
The taxi turned onto Kettleworth Road and I let my head rest against the window, watching streetlights slide past—each one the same dull orange, each one carrying me further from a boy who was learning to breathe without me. My palms wouldn't stop shaking no matter how hard I pressed.