What is to be lost

The waiting room smelled like lavender and cold money, the kind of scent that was purchased in bulk and diffused through vents to make desperate people feel calm in some type of way. It wasn't working on me… I sat with my knees pressed together, spine painfully straight, trying not to wrinkle the second-hand blazer I had borrowed from the back of my mother's wardrobe without asking. The fabric was a size too small, itching around my collar like it was trying to remind me I didn't belong here. I didn't move, though. I barely breathed. Every muscle in my body was wound tight, coiled like a spring ready to snap, and everything inside me screamed to get up, walk back through those glass doors, and pretend I had never found this address tucked inside an envelope on our kitchen table. But I didn't move!. Because I couldn't afford to. The women around me sat in the kind of silence that cost thousands to maintain. Silk blouses. Manicured fingers curled lightly around designer bags. Not a single crease on any of them. They looked like they had been pressed and delivered here, whereas I looked like I had taken three buses and rehearsed my breathing the entire way. I was wearing my mother's blazer and my own fear, and I could feel both of them suffocating me. I wasn't one of these women. I didn't carry myself like money was something I had never stopped worrying about. And I wasn't here for comfort, or luxury, or whatever quiet elegance this place was trying to sell through its marble floors and ambient lighting. I was here to sell something no one could see on the outside. ….My womb…. I turned the thought over in my mind slowly, the way you turn over something sharp, careful not to cut yourself. It had taken me three weeks to get here, three weeks of reading the anonymous listing twice a day, of closing the tab and reopening it, of standing over my father's hospital bed watching the machines breathe for him and asking myself how much I was willing to give. The answer I had finally decided was everything. So here I was. Knees together. Spine straight. Blazer itching. "Miss Valerie Eloise?" My head jerked up faster than I intended. A young woman stood over me, early thirties, tailored heels, cheekbones sharp enough to cut glass. She smiled at me the way people smile when they are paid to, warm on the surface and completely professional underneath, like I was her eleven o'clock appointment and she had four more after me. "Yes," I said, rising too quickly. My voice cracked down in the middle. I cleared my throat, smoothed the front of my skirt with both palms, and tried again, slower this time. "That's me." She gave a small, practised nod and turned on her heel. "He's ready for you." I followed her down a corridor that felt like it belonged to a different world entirely. Too quiet. Too clean. The kind of clean that doesn't just scrub away dirt but seems to scrub away personality too, until all that's left are white walls and the faint hum of air conditioning and the unsettling feeling that you are leaving footprints where you shouldn't be. I kept my eyes forward and my hands at my sides. At the end of the hallway, she stopped at a heavy wooden door, pushed it open without knocking, and stepped aside like a page turning. And there he was. Anthony Bridgeton. He sat behind a sleek walnut desk that probably cost more than my father's entire hospital stay, flipping through a manila folder with the focused calm of a man who had long since made peace with making decisions that reshaped other people's lives. The soft overhead lighting caught the deep bronze of his skin and the careful architecture of his beard, trimmed close and precise, like every other thing about him. He wore a dark shirt, no tie, sleeves rolled to the forearm. He looked like the kind of man who had walked off the cover of a luxury magazine and simply never bothered to walk back. Everything about him whispered power. The measured way he held himself. The unhurried way he turned pages. The stillness of a man who had never once had to rush for anything. He looked up slowly, and his eyes found mine before I had even fully stepped into the room. "Valerie Eloise," he said. Not a question. A statement. Like he had already memorized the file, and I was simply confirming what he already knew. I blinked. My throat had gone completely dry. "Yes, sir." He gestured to the chair across from him without a word,I sat, folding my hands on my lap so he wouldn't see them trembling. He tapped the closed folder in front of him. "You've read the terms of the contract?" "Yes," I said. I had skimmed it. Read the first page properly, panicked somewhere around clause five, and spent the rest of the time convincing myself that the details didn't matter as much as the number at the bottom of the page. But I needed this too desperately to hesitate, so I held his gaze, and I said yes with a steadiness that contained doubt. He slid the papers across the desk toward me. "I want you to reread them carefully. Take your time." His voice was even, unhurried. "You don't sign out of desperation. You sign out of clarity." The room was so quiet I could hear my own heartbeat pressing against my ribs. I pulled the papers closer and looked down at the lines of dense legal language, trying to find the parts that mattered. And then I found one I hadn't noticed before. I read it once. Then again. "There's one thing I didn't understand," I said carefully, eyes still on the fine print, because I wasn't sure I could look at him and say this out loud. "This says… you're using my egg..?" A pause. Then he looked up slowly, his gaze unreadable, like a wall with no doors. "Correct." The word landed in my chest like something heavy. I made myself breathe. "So the baby would be… biologically mine. And yours." "Yes."