Chapter 8 - Two FathersFor ten full seconds, I couldn’t speak.
We both arrived early.
Neither of us knew how to greet the other.
She was a petite woman with curly brown hair, tired green eyes, and the guarded posture of someone who had spent too long being told she was imagining things.
Nathaniel introduced us.
“Lauren, this is Emily.”
“Hi.”
“Hi.”
Then silence.
What do you say to a stranger who may be raising a child created from your stolen egg?
Nice to meet you felt obscene.
Emily solved it.
“I’m sorry this happened to you.”
My throat tightened.
“I’m sorry it happened to you.”
She nodded.
We sat.
Her husband, Mark, joined by video because he was home with their daughter.
Nathaniel explained what investigators had found so far.
Emily listened with both hands wrapped around a paper cup.
Three years earlier, she and Mark had undergone IVF at Sterling.
They had struggled with male-factor infertility.
They were told an embryo created from Emily’s egg and Mark’s sperm had been transferred.
The pregnancy succeeded.
Their daughter, Sophie, was born healthy.
Everything seemed normal until Sophie developed a severe peanut allergy.
As part of a broader genetic panel, a pediatric specialist noted an inconsistency.
Emily’s blood type was A positive.
Mark’s was O positive.
Sophie’s was B positive.
“That’s when we started asking questions,” Emily said.
“Sterling was already closed.”
She contacted the records administrator.
The records were incomplete.
Then she ordered a private DNA test.
“I thought maybe there had been a donor-sperm mix-up.”
Her voice trembled.
“But Mark is Sophie's biological father.”
I held my breath.
“And you?”
Emily’s eyes filled.
“I’m not.”
The room blurred.
I looked away.
Nathaniel spoke carefully.
“We don’t yet have confirmation that Lauren is genetically related to Sophie.”
“But you think she is,” Emily said.
“We have documentary reasons to investigate.”
Emily looked at me.
I expected resentment.
Fear.
Possessiveness.
Instead, she whispered, “I’m terrified.”
“So am I.”
“She’s my daughter.”
I nodded immediately.
“I know.”
“I carried her.”
“I know.”
“I fed her every two hours for six months because she refused to sleep.”
A tear slid down her cheek.
“I know.”
“She calls me Mommy.”
“Emily.”
My own voice broke.
“I am not here to take your daughter.”
She began crying harder.
Relief and pain mixed together.
“I’m sorry.”
“You don’t have to apologize.”
“I don’t know what I’m supposed to feel.”
“Neither do I.”
That was the truth.
I had lain awake imagining Sophie.
Wondering what she looked like.
Whether she had my eyes.
Whether she laughed loudly.
Whether she hated peas.
And then I hated myself for imagining her as mine.
Because she had a mother.
A real mother.
Emily.
Biology could be important without erasing love.
Nathaniel recommended a court-supervised DNA test.
Emily and Mark agreed.
So did I.
The results took five days.
Those five days felt longer than my entire marriage.
Meanwhile, David began unraveling.
Whitmore Analytics placed him on administrative leave after news of the Sterling investigation leaked internally.
Two clients suspended contracts.
The company board hired independent counsel.
David blamed me.
His message came at 1:13 a.m.
You’re destroying hundreds of people’s livelihoods because you’re angry about our marriage.
I stared at it.
Then answered for the first time in weeks.
You signed my name while doctors took eggs from my body without my consent.
Three dots appeared.
Disappeared.
Returned.
Finally:
It wasn’t supposed to happen that way.
I screenshotted it.
Sent it to Nathaniel.
Then wrote:
How was it supposed to happen?
No answer.
The next morning, detectives requested another interview with him.
He arrived with a criminal-defense attorney.
That afternoon, a search warrant was executed at Whitmore Analytics.
By then, I almost felt detached from the chaos.
My life had narrowed to two things.
The twins inside me.
And the DNA test.
On Friday, Nathaniel called.
“The results are in.”
I couldn’t drive.
Rachel took me.
Emily and Mark attended by video.
Nathaniel held a sealed report.
He didn’t draw it out.
“Lauren is Sophie’s biological mother.”
Emily covered her mouth.
I closed my eyes.
The words hit somewhere deeper than language.
Biological mother.
I thought about the morning I woke in pain three years earlier.
About the eggs I didn’t know had been taken.
About a pregnancy I never carried.
A birth I never knew happened.
A little girl whose first steps I never saw.
Then I looked at Emily.
She was sobbing.
I stood and walked toward the screen almost instinctively.
“You’re her mother.”
Emily looked at me.
“So are you.”
I shook my head.
“Not the way you are.”
That mattered.
Sophie was not an object to be divided between injured adults.
She was a child.
She deserved stability.
Love.
Truth, eventually.
But not war.
Mark appeared beside Emily on screen.
His eyes were red.
“I don’t know what to say.”
“You don’t have to say anything.”
He looked down.
“We thought we were creating our child with Emily’s egg.”
“I know.”
“We would never have agreed to this.”
“I know.”
“I’m sorry.”
“So am I.”
Then a small voice came from somewhere off camera.
“Daddy?”
Everyone froze.
A little girl climbed into Mark’s lap.
Sophie.
My lungs forgot how to work.
She had dark curls.
Green-gray eyes.
A round little face.
She held a stuffed giraffe by the neck.
“Who’s that?” she asked.
Mark looked at Emily.
Emily looked at me.
I couldn’t speak.
Finally Emily smiled through tears.
“That’s Mommy’s new friend.”
Sophie waved.
“Hi, friend.”
My hand shook as I waved back.
“Hi, Sophie.”
She grinned.
And something inside my heart broke open.
Not ownership.
Not grief exactly.
Something more complicated.
Recognition without memory.
Love without history.
Loss mixed with gratitude.
Emily had been there.
She had kissed scraped knees.
Changed diapers.
Stayed up through fevers.
She had done everything Sterling stole from me.
And yet because of her, Sophie had been loved.
After the call ended, I cried until my chest hurt.
Then Nathaniel gave me another document.
“There’s more.”
I wiped my face.
“What now?”
“The embryo used for Emily’s pregnancy was created using your egg and Mark’s sperm.”
“That makes sense.”
“But Meridian’s internal records show something else.”
He placed a page in front of me.
“There were eight cryopreserved eggs assigned to your patient code.”
“Yes.”
“According to this, five were later destroyed.”
My throat tightened.
“And three?”
“Transferred to a separate facility.”
“Where?”
“Unknown.”
“Why?”
“Meridian research program.”
I stared.
“Are there more children?”
“We don’t know.”
The room seemed to tilt again.
“How many women did they do this to?”
“Investigators suspect at least nineteen.”
Nineteen.
I thought of nineteen women waking from procedures they hadn’t authorized.
Nineteen couples unknowingly building families from stolen reproductive material.
Nineteen lives shattered by men in suits who called human beings “cohorts.”
Then Nathaniel said, “David’s name appears on more than your consent paperwork.”
I looked up.
“How many?”
“Seven patients.”
My blood froze.
“What?”
“He served as a technology consultant during a data-transfer project.”
“So he knew.”
“We need to establish exactly what he knew.”
“He knew enough to sign.”
“Yes.”
“Why me?”
Nathaniel hesitated.
“Investigators think your participation was used to demonstrate the system to Meridian executives.”
I laughed once.
A broken sound.
“My husband used me as a demo?”
“We don’t know whether he understood the full scope when it started.”
“But later?”
Nathaniel met my eyes.
“He received a $300,000 consulting payment two weeks after your retrieval.”
I stopped breathing.
Not $1.8 million to the company.
Three hundred thousand personally.
“What did he do with it?”
“Do you remember the down payment on your house?”
I did.
David told me his father had loaned us the money.
I felt physically sick.
“My house.”
Nathaniel nodded.
“You may have been living in a property partly purchased with money connected to what was done to you.”
I stood.
“I want out.”
“Of the house?”
“Of everything connected to him.”
I walked toward the window.
Sixteen weeks earlier, I would have told anyone David was a good man.
Eleven weeks earlier, I still wanted a baby with him.
Now I was pregnant with twins whose father had accused me of betrayal while hiding a crime committed against my body.
And somewhere in Indianapolis, a little girl carried half my DNA.
I rested my hand on my stomach.
Then my phone rang.
Dr. Shah.
I answered immediately.
“Lauren, your latest blood work came back.”
My heart jumped.
“Is something wrong with the babies?”
“No. They look good.”
I exhaled.
“But we received your expanded genetic screening.”
“And?”
She paused.
“There’s something unusual.”
My stomach tightened again.
“What?”
“One of the twins appears genetically inconsistent with David.”
I went completely still.
“What do you mean?”
“The screening isn’t a paternity test, and we need confirmatory testing.”
I gripped the windowsill.
May you like
“But?”
“Lauren, preliminary markers suggest the twins may not share the same biological father.”
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