Chapter 3 - The ConfessionBack at the mansion, the silence felt suffocating.
Lily slept upstairs.
James locked himself inside his study.
Richard sat in the kitchen with a glass of whiskey.
Margaret pressed frozen peas against her cheek.
Then she laughed.
“You think you've won?”
I stared at her.
“What did you do?”
Her eyes became strangely calm.
“Six years ago, you and James were desperate. Your IVF had failed. You were talking about adoption.”
I remembered.
The heartbreak.
The doctors.
The nights James and I had cried together.
Margaret had comforted us.
She had promised to help.
Instead, she'd planned everything.
She had frozen her own eggs years earlier.
She paid a fertility doctor hundreds of thousands of dollars.
Her egg.
James's sperm.
My body.
She had secretly arranged for the embryo to be implanted inside me.
The pregnancy I believed was ours had been engineered behind my back.
“You used me,” I whispered.
Margaret shrugged.
“Someone had to carry her.”
“You stole my pregnancy.”
“I gave this family a perfect child.”
Then James appeared in the doorway.
He had heard everything.
His face was pale.
“Get out.”
Margaret stared at him.
“James—”
“Get out of my house.”
She smiled bitterly.
“You'll come back.”
Then she walked away.
But before she disappeared through the front door, she looked upstairs.
May you like
Toward Lily.
And something in her eyes frightened me.
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