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Her voice hiccuped into a painful bubble that was caught in her throat.
This time she would keep her baby. She would have to learn how to guide it through all the trials of life. What the hell did she know about loving and caring for someone? Teaching them how to be good and kind?
“What happens if I’m a terrible mother?” she asked in a choke. “What if I ruin our child?”
“Ruin? Or spoil?” He brushed a stray tendril of hair from where it tickled her cheek and tucked it behind her ear. “I’m sure we’ll both be overindulgent, but even if we make mistakes, I’m not worried. Your mother is incompetent at best and you turned out beautifully.”
“Ha!” she barked and fresh tears pushed against the backs of her eyes. Her chest hurt. Really hurt. She kept her arms wedged between them, resisting him and what he’d just said because he was wrong.
“So you were an unruly party girl for a few years.” He laced his fingers behind her lower back. “That’s what makes you interesting.”
Most of her stories on that front were exaggerated or appropriated from her friends’ exploits. It had always served her to be seen as wild. It drove her parents up a wall and threw them off the scent of what she’d really been up to at sixteen.
“Alexandra.” His hand burrowed under her hair and cupped the side of her neck. “Every parent has moments of self-doubt. I’m sure we’ll have many, but we’re a good team. We’ve proven that.”
A good team. Her heart panged. Was that all she was to him? Someone who wore the same jersey?
“We’ll get through whatever we face so long as we do what we’ve always done—be honest with each other.”
She swallowed back another scoffing, Ha! Her eyes refused to lift higher than the buttons on his shirt, fearing he would see how much she was hiding.
“You are always honest with me, aren’t you?” he pressed.
Her pulse seemed to beat harder against the palm that still rested against her throat.
“Yes.” Her voice rasped over what felt like a lie. She was honest with him.
But not transparent.
“Let’s not borrow trouble, then. If something happens, we’ll deal with it together.” He drew her into his embrace once more, urging her to melt against him. His mouth pressed to her temple and his voice held a note of awe. “Let’s take a moment to celebrate our first baby being on the way.”
His first.
Her whole body checked, but she made herself override her stiffness and hugged him while hiding her face in the hard plane of his chest.
They were back in Athens when Rafael realized he had expected the baby news would restore their marriage to the way things had been before they had embarked on trying to start a family.
It wasn’t like him to delude himself. He was an unapologetic realist, but it struck him rather hard when he realized the distance between him and his wife was growing, not shrinking.
She still had conflicted feelings around her own fertility, he supposed.
They’d had to take mandatory counseling sessions before Dr. Narula was willing to allow Molly to surrogate so he had as good an understanding as a man could have of how Alexandra might be struggling with a sense of failure or inadequacy, especially now that they were relying on someone else to carry their baby.
He had mixed feelings about the process himself. As Alexandra had said the first time they’d considered “other options,” using a surrogate felt as though they were allowing a stranger to infiltrate their marriage.
Not that he had any quarrel with Molly. He found her to be pleasant and eager in the way of an A-student who wished to earn top marks for baby-building. She might be doing this for financial gain, but she wasn’t greedy about it.
On the contrary, she had brought a sensible figure to the table based on the going rates in the U.S. and other countries that allowed compensation for this particular service. She had asked him to cover expenses like health care, maternity clothes, and putting her career on hold, but it was all very reasonable.
She’d been appalled when Rafael added a zero to the end of her opening ask, then tried to talk him down, which had been amusing. He related to her, though. She wasn’t an orphan, but she came from humble, middle-class roots and brought those practical sensibilities with her along with a streak of ambition. Hers wasn’t nearly as cutthroat as his own, but he respected her for having one.
She had also brought up a number of considerations he hadn’t thought of himself, proving she took this task very seriously.
From the beginning, she had been accommodating and discreet, happily signing a nondisclosure agreement while she went through the early tests. Once she was determined to be a healthy and suitable candidate, and they decided to proceed, they had sat down to negotiate the actual surrogacy agreement. Molly had raised intelligent questions around what would happen if they were unable to take custody or some other misfortune befell any of them. She had been all business and very flexible on every point except two.
“With regards to the nondisclosure agreement, I would like to include my mother in this process moving forward. She’s a midwife and very well versed in patient confidentiality. You won’t have any concerns around that side of it and she will be an enormous emotional support and resource for me.”
“We can agree to that,” Alexandra had said promptly, despite the fact that she was the one who always insisted on profound secrecy.
