The CEO Surrogate

7

Five Years of Silence

Bianca answered on the second ring, which meant she was still awake, which meant she was either watching something on her laptop or worrying about something. With Bianca, those were the only two nocturnal states.

"Mila." Her voice had that particular warmth it always held when Camila called — relieved and pleased and slightly careful, the way you spoke to someone you loved and had learned not to crowd. "It's late. Are you okay?"

"I got a letter," Camila said.

A pause. "From who?"

"The Vasconcelos estate."

The silence on the other end was different this time. Longer and heavier and freighted with the particular quality of someone who had been waiting for a thing to happen and now felt the mixed dread of being right.

"Bianca," Camila said. "Did you know?"

"I—" She stopped. Started again. "Rafael mentioned something six months ago. About the estate filing inquiries. But he didn't tell me details. He wouldn't, you know how he is. I didn't know a letter was coming."

"But you thought it might."

Another pause. "I thought it was possible."

Camila pressed the heel of her hand against her forehead. "You should have told me."

"I know." The remorse in her voice was genuine. "Mila, I know. I just — I didn't want to alarm you over something that might have come to nothing. And I didn't have real information, only—"

"I have twenty-one days," Camila said.

The silence stretched.

"Okay," Bianca said, and her voice had shifted into the register Camila trusted most: clear, practical, the Bianca who showed up when things were actually serious. "Okay. What does the letter ask you to do?"

"Submit to a process. They want documentation. They're talking about DNA."

"Have you spoken to a solicitor?"

"It's eleven at night."

"Tomorrow, then. First thing. Not Rafael — you need your own counsel. I know a woman in the Baixa, she's good, she's sharp, she doesn't play." A beat. "Mila. Does Leonardo know about Daniel?"

The name, spoken aloud, did its usual thing to her chest.

"No," she said. "I don't believe so. The letter is from the estate solicitor. It reads like it came from the family investigation, not from him directly."

"That doesn't mean he doesn't know."

"I know."

"Are you going to tell him?"

She looked at the letter. At Daniel's name, spelled out in official typeface on official paper, already belonging to a world that had been waiting for him to arrive in it.

"I don't think that's a decision I get to make anymore," she said.

She called the solicitor Bianca recommended — a woman named Dra. Ana Tavares, precise and direct and reassuringly unsentimental — and they met the following morning while Daniel was at nursery and her mother was at her appointment.

Dra. Tavares read the letter twice, asked three questions, and then sat back and told Camila what she thought.

"They have enough to compel a DNA test," she said. "Not necessarily through the courts, but the estate's legal standing in this matter is genuinely complex. If Eduardo Vasconcelos amended his will to account for a potential heir, and if the evidence they've gathered points convincingly to your son—" she paused "—then this is not something that resolves with a politely worded refusal."

"What do I do?"

"Ideally?" Dra. Tavares looked at her steadily. "You go to Lisbon. You initiate contact before they initiate it for you. You control the narrative before the narrative controls you." A pause. "What is your relationship currently with the child's father?"

"We don't have one."

"Have you been in contact in the last five years?"

"No."

"Does he know the child exists?"

Camila looked at her hands. "No."

Dra. Tavares was too professional to react beyond a slight shift in her expression. "Then your first priority, before the estate and before the legal process, is managing that conversation. Because the moment Leonardo Vasconcelos learns about his son from a solicitor's letter rather than from you, you lose any goodwill you might otherwise have."

"He doesn't have goodwill toward me," Camila said. "He thinks I manipulated him. His wife told him—"

"What his wife told him five years ago," Dra. Tavares said, "may or may not still be the operating truth. A lot can change in five years, especially in a marriage like that one." She slid the letter back across the desk. "I'm told they divorced three years ago."

Camila's head came up.

"I thought you might not know," Dra. Tavares said, not unkindly.

She told her mother that night.

She'd been putting it off for five years, which was, she was aware, an absurd thing to say. She'd told her mother the basics back then — that the arrangement had ended badly, that she'd decided to keep the pregnancy, that Daniel's father was not in the picture and would not be. Her mother, to her credit, had asked one question — "Is he a good man or a bad one?" — and when Camila had said she honestly didn't know, her mother had accepted that and never pushed.

But she told her now. All of it. The contract, Sofia, the night in the penthouse, the clinic and Sofia's face and the long walk along the Cascais seafront. Running. Porto. The letter.

Her mother listened without interrupting, which was one of her great skills — the ability to receive information entirely, without filling the gaps with herself.

When Camila finished, the kitchen was quiet.

"You've been carrying that for five years," her mother said.

"Yes."

"By yourself."

"Yes."

Her mother reached across the table and put her hand over Camila's. Her hand was thinner than it used to be but it was warm and familiar and it was enough.

"You have to go back," her mother said.

"I know."

"And you have to tell him. Not the lawyers. You."

Camila looked at the window box. The bare dirt where tomatoes would grow again in spring.

"He'll be angry," she said.

"Probably."

"He might try to take Daniel."

Her mother was quiet for a moment. Then: "Or he might not. You don't know who he is now. People change, Camila. Even cold ones. Especially cold ones, when the right thing cracks them open."

Camila thought of the hairline fracture in his voice on the phone. The rolled-up sleeves. The way he'd said I believe you in the low light above a rainy city.

"I'll go on Friday," she said.