ALPHA DOM AND HIS HUMAN SURROGATE

"Sign here, here, and here. Congratulations, Ms. Navarro, in approximately nine months, you'll be a mother."

I sign without hesitating.

That's the thing about decisions you've made a thousand times in your head before you actually make them. By the time the pen hits paper, your hand doesn't shake. Your eyes don't water. You just sign, cap the pen, and slide the clipboard back across the desk like you're approving a lease renewal and not the most terrifying thing you've ever chosen to do.

"Thank you," I say.

Dr. Maddox smiles at me the way doctors smile when they're relieved a patient isn't crying. I've been that patient before. Not today.

Today I am completely fine.

I've been completely fine for eleven days, ever since I found the texts on Marco's phone while he was in the shower. His contact name for her was "Gia work" like I wouldn't recognize Gia Ferrante's number, my supposed best friend, a woman I'd known since college. Two years of messages. I'd stood in our bathroom holding his phone while the shower ran and read enough to understand exactly what I was looking at, and then I'd set the phone face-down on the counter and gone back to bed.

I had an appointment to keep. Falling apart had to wait.

It still does.

"We'll call you with your monitoring schedule," the receptionist says as I pass the front desk. She's young, enthusiastic, the kind of person who hasn't yet learned that good news and bad news can arrive in the same envelope. "Fingers crossed for you!"

"Thanks," I say. "I'll take all the crossed fingers I can get."

I mean it more than she knows.

The train home smells like coffee and someone's leftover lunch, and I stand the whole ride because the seats are full and I don't mind standing. I'm used to it. I've been standing on my own since I was nineteen, the year my mother died and left me a small apartment, a stack of bills, and the particular kind of loneliness that comes from losing the one person who thought you were exceptional just for existing.

I got over it. You do.

I became a nurse. I worked nights. I saved money with the focused intensity of someone who understands that safety is something you build yourself because no one else is going to build it for you. And then Marco walked into my life and for four years I let myself believe in the shared version of things. The joint account. The future. The family we kept saying we'd start when the time was right.

The time was right eight months ago. That's when we started the fertility process. That's when I learned my window was closing faster than I'd expected, and we sat in a consultation room not unlike the one I just left and the doctor laid it out clearly: sooner rather than later.

Marco proposed three weeks after that appointment. I thought it was because