Prologue
Alessia
Sleep was evading me once again, and I knew a lot of it had to do with the small life growing inside of my belly. When I signed on to become a surrogate for Anton and Elsa Kingston, I had never expected the rollercoaster that pregnancy had been. Initially, I just needed some funding for medical school. It was extremely expensive, and my student loans only covered so much.
The amount of money that I’d earn from carrying a child for this couple would pay for the next few years of school. It’d all been a whirlwind in the beginning, and Anton’s name and influence only made things more difficult. At first, I thought I would be carrying a child for a same sex couple, but I quickly learned that the couple I’d be helping involved a Hollywood heartthrob whose very poster had been hanging on my dorm wall. He was one of the hottest men in Hollywood and had just been announced as this year’s face for a very popular magazine’s “Sexiest Man Alive” edition.
It made things a bit awkward so even before I subjected myself to all the fertility tests and procedures, I had removed his pictures. He was much nicer than I thought he’d be, and his wife was the sweetest. I was honestly happy to provide this service for them, or I was until I realized I was going to have to push this watermelon out of me soon. Labor and delivery scared the bejeesus out of me, and I didn’t know which part terrified me more. That terror was likely the reason I couldn’t get any sleep. Insomnia had plagued me since I was younger, but being unable to easily roll over in bed anymore didn’t help either.
I let out a sigh, then ran my hand over my hard belly. We already knew the baby was a boy, and unlike most new mothers, I couldn’t sit here and pick out names. Anton and Elsa would name their child and take him home, and I’d be relegated to pictures either obtained online or generously provided by them. In the beginning, it didn’t seem like a big deal. Now that I had felt him kick and move inside of me, my feelings had shifted, but there was nothing I could do about it. This child wasn’t mine, and it never would be. I was simply a womb for their DNA.
“Maybe one day I will have a child of my own,” I murmured to him as I rubbed my hand over where he was nestled.
Something clenched in my belly and I smiled as I thought about this baby responding to me. I ignored the slight cramp and got up. Walking around usually helped when I was as tense as I found myself right now. When I finally got onto my feet, I tried stretching. My back had been dully aching for the last few days, and I had read about that being one of the signs of preterm labor.
I was currently living in a small studio apartment, so the bed was mere feet from the kitchen. In the time it took me to walk from point A to point B, the ache began to intensify. One or two of the contractions were intense enough to make me grab onto the counter. There was a definite start and end to them, and luckily, they seemed spaced apart enough to not cause too much anxiety.
I made my way to the refrigerator and grabbed a bottled water. After twisting off the top, I took a large swig, then another two or three until the next contraction had me ready to double over. I remembered the breathing classes that Elsa had dragged me to, and while it seemed easy enough in theory to focus on an object and do something so natural when your insides were stretching and spasming, the task wasn’t quite so simple.
“Fuck,” I cursed when another soon followed and I tried to remember what I was told about timing them.
The pain was like a fist, squeezing my abdomen. My body grew tight as it paralyzed me, then a few moments of relief would follow until they started again. I grabbed my water and went to take another sip, but the bottle slipped from my hand as another rocked my small body. Tears sprung to my eyes and I didn’t even care that there was now water dripping from the counter onto the floor. I slowly made my way back to the bed where my cellphone was charging on the nightstand beside it.
When I got it opened, I hit one of the numbers I had on speed dial. It didn’t take long before Elsa’s cheery voice came through the line. “Alessia?”
“Yeah. I wanted to let you... Ohh.” I couldn’t even get it out. The contractions were coming closer together and each one was getting longer in duration, too.
“Are you okay? Is it the baby?” she asked, the concern in her voice evident.
“I-I’m going into labor,” I stammered, then let out a relieved sigh at the moment’s peace that followed.
“Stay calm,” she advised, and while I wanted to tell her it wasn’t really that easy, I didn’t want to worry her. “I’m calling an ambulance, and we will meet you at the hospital.”
The line went dead before I could say anything, and I spent the next several minutes putting on some sweatpants and T-shirt. Two weeks earlier, I had packed my hospital bag and it was right beside the bed. I had just managed to get dressed before there was a knock on the door. Grabbing my bag and phone, I made my way to answer it.
The next twenty minutes went by in a blur. My water broke on the way downstairs which was just my luck. The EMT had assured me that everything was fine. I was embarrassed but chose to take him at his word because the steady contractions left me unable to focus on anything other than the pain. It hadn’t taken long to get to the Mount Sinai Hospital on Fifth Avenue. Many celebrities gave birth there, so it was no surprise Anton Kingston would choose the same place.
Before long, I was settled into one of the birthing rooms. It all seemed so real now. For nine months, I had deluded myself into thinking this was nothing major, but my contractions were holding steady at five minutes apart, with each lasting at least a full minute. Elsa and Anton were on their way. I had gotten her excited text messages as I lay there in bed with an IV in my hand and monitors strapped to my abdomen.
I could already imagine how gorgeous this baby would be. Anton was rightfully dubbed the Sexiest Man Alive, and Elsa was such a classic beauty. She seemed to give me those Grace Kelly vibes. I had once mentioned that to her and she’d seemed surprised I would even know who that was. I had grown up watching vintage movies with my grandparents, especially my grandfather, Earl, who would tell me my grandmother, Lonnie, was twice as beautiful as her. Their love story was the type authors wrote about. I used to dream about finding the same thing for myself, but in this day and age, nothing was the same.
I shuddered to think how things would be for this baby when he was my age, and it caused me to focus back on him and labor. It was a good thing I did because the proud parents entered the room. Of course, Anton went to talk to the nurse notating some things on my chart while Elsa started to fuss over me.
“Do you need anything?” she asked after she fluffed my pillow.
“I need to have this baby,” I told her, while smiling weakly.
“I’m so excited, Alessia. You can’t even imagine how much this means to me and Anton. I—”
“We need to do some measurements,” the nurse told us, and Elsa stepped back.
I tried to focus on her gorgeous face, and seeing her with Anton as they talked excitedly to one another, it was apparent how badly they wanted this baby. From what they had told me during the surrogacy interviews, she had once been pregnant, but lost the child to miscarriage. She was then told she would never be able to carry a baby to term and my heart had broken for her. The couple had been so devastated, and I knew how happy this child would make them.
I wanted to heal what was broken inside of others. I had always been that way as far back as I could remember. When other girls played with Barbie dolls and makeup, I had plastic stethoscopes and would run around the house pretending I was a doctor. It had been all I had ever wanted to be, and I was so close to making that dream come true. In a way, Anton and Elsa were essentially helping me because without the money I earned from this surrogacy, I might have had to drop out of medical school all together.
“Nine centimeters. It looks like this little one is ready to come out,” the woman happily exclaimed, and I didn’t know who wanted that more — me or this baby boy.
The contractions continued, and soon, they began to blur together. I’d never experienced such intense physical pain in all my life.