The Grumpy Doctor’s Nanny

Whispers Of The Past

After my call with Sally, I lay in bed, trying to will my brain to slumber. I lay in bed staring at the ceiling, the soft glow of the night-light flickering across the room like tiny waves of gold. My body felt heavy and exhausted, but sleep refused to come. I thought of Lila, gosh I wanted to help her. I want her to reach for my hand I want her to say goodnight instead of nodding silently.

Something inside me kept whispering that I knew her. Not in the casual way you know someone’s habits or favorite colors. No… in the way a heart knows its missing piece.

That thought terrified me. Because I knew why I felt that way, and I didn't want to go to that place.

So I closed my eyes and, like clockwork, the past crept up on me slow, merciless, inevitable.

It was the winter I turned nineteen. A winter that never stopped bleeding into the rest of my life. I can still smell the antiseptic from the hospital corridors, still hear the mechanical beeping from my mother’s machines. Back then, I used to count the beeps in place of prayers maybe because prayers had stopped feeling like they worked.

My father had debts, deep, ugly, rotting debts. Years of poor decisions, gambling disguised as “risk-taking,” business investments that were nothing more than scams he convinced himself were opportunities. When my mother got sick, he panicked. We all did. But while I was trying to figure out how to keep her alive, he was running from men who wanted their money. They used to bang on our door at night. Sometimes they’d sit outside in their car with the engine running for hours. A warning. A promise.

I should have hated him then.

But I didn’t. I was too busy trying to keep my mother breathing.

The night everything fell apart had been snowing so heavily that even the streets looked buried under grief. My father came home shaking, pale, defeated, the kind of broken that made him look older than he was.

“They gave me one week,” he whispered. “One week, Cal. After that… I—I can’t protect you. I can’t protect your mother.”

I had never seen him cry before. It was a terrible thing, to watch your father crumble. To realize you were the stronger one now.

I didn’t sleep that night. I sat with my mother, holding her cold hands, watching her chest rise and fall faintly under the oxygen. At dawn, when the first strip of gold broke through the curtains, I made my decision. The kind of decision you don’t recover from. The kind you live with like a scar inside your ribs.

The surrogacy agency’s letter was still in my drawer. I’d received it months earlier after applying out of desperation. I hadn’t wanted to go through with it, not because of the pregnancy itself but because the couple wanted an anonymous arrangement. Completely anonymous. They didn’t want the surrogate to know their names, their faces, or anything about their life. They also insisted the surrogate should use her own egg.

“It’s unusual,” the agency counselor had told me. “They want the child to be genetically related to the surrogate and the father, not the intended mother.”

I remember asking why.

The counselor shrugged. “They say it’s for medical reasons.”

At the time, I believed them. Now, laying in this enormous soft bed miles away from that tiny apartment I once hid in, I wasn’t sure what I believed anymore.

But that winter morning, I wasn’t thinking about ethics or consequences. I was thinking about the bill sitting on my mother’s hospital bed. I was thinking about the men outside our door. I was thinking about losing everything.

So I signed the papers.

The pregnancy wasn’t what people imagined. It wasn’t glowing skin and baby kicks and late-night cravings. It was nausea, loneliness, and panic. It was hiding under oversized sweaters so the neighbors wouldn’t ask questions. It was silently crying when no one was home. The amount I received for expensesduring the pregnancywere enough to cover my mother’s bills and pay half of the debts my father owed.

The agency ran everything strictly. I wasn’t allowed to know the father’s identity. I wasn’t allowed to meet him. I wasn’t allowed to hear his voice. Every appointment was done behind a privacy barrier. The intended mother never attended. “She’s fragile,” the agency said whenever I asked.

I wondered what that meant. Fragile like glass? Fragile like guilt?

The only time I ever felt connected to the baby was in the quiet moments, when she kicked softly, like she was brushing her tiny foot against the inside of my stomach. I used to talk to her even though I wasn’t supposed to. I’d whisper things like:

“You’re going to be loved. They will give you a better life than I ever could.”

And sometimes:

“I’m sorry.”

I apologized a lot. Maybe too much.

The night she was born, the hospital room was so cold I felt like I could see my breath. Labor was long, hours and hours of pain that blurred into a single scream. When they placed her on my chest, just for a moment, I felt her warmth. She was tiny. Fragile. Beautiful.

She had blond wisps of hair.

Her fingers curled around mine.

I wasn’t supposed to see her face, it was against the rules, but a nurse, an older woman with kind eyes, whispered, “One moment won’t hurt. Mothers deserve one moment.”

Mothers.

I wasn’t one. Not really. Not legally. Not in any way that counted.

But holding her… God. Something inside me cracked open. Something I didn’t know existed.

Then they took her away. Quickly. Efficiently. Like she was a product being transferred, not a child being separated from the only person she’d ever known.

The moment they wheeled her out of the room, a coldness spread through me that no blanket could fix.

Three days later, I went home. My mother passed away within the month.

My father disappeared not long after, stealing the check with the last payment for the surrogacy.

And I… kept breathing somehow.

But I never healed. I know I signed an agreement but I can’t help but wonder how she is.

I open my eyes now, lying in a mansion, in a soft bed, with warmth I didn’t have back then… and yet the same cold dread curls around me.

Maybe it’s, Because Lila is six. Because Lila has blond wisps of hair. Maybe it was the wound that would never heal.

I feel sick.

My throat tightens. My vision blurs.

I curl onto my side, clutching the blanket as if it can stop the trembling in my bones. A broken, strangled sound escapes my throat. I press my fist against my mouth to stifle the sob.

the memory of that little baby…

The weight of her tiny body…

The soft, helpless wail she let out the first time she breathed air…

Those memories had never left me. They lived under my skin.

And something about Lila, her age, her quietness, the way she seemed afraid to take up space, sliced open wounds I had spent years trying to stitch shut.

I swallowed hard and pressed the heel of my palm against my eyes.

“I shouldn’t think about her,” I whispered to myself. “It doesn’t change anything.”

But memories aren’t obedient. They don’t wait for permission. They come like storms.

And mine arrived with no mercy.