Nine Months to Bear By Nicole Fox - 13

13

The drive back to the office is a blur. My brain has been buffering, all systems overheating with the processing power required to understand how the hell I got myself here.

But I didn’t just get myself here, did I? I took half a dozen other women down with me.

I glance down at the folders piled high on my desk, the stacks of candidates I spent all night making up. They’re fake, because I wanted to see just what would happen if I did give Stefan what he wanted. And I made them the best of the best so I could offer them up to Stefan like lambs to slaughter, positive he wouldn’t be able to refuse.

Candidate three’s photo peeks out at me from the bent corner of the folder. Viktoria Fitzsimmons: Olympic swimmer, PhD candidate, fertility markers off the charts. The kind of woman any man would want, the kind of daughter any mother would approve of. The daughter my own mother probably lays in bed praying for at night.

And yet, Viktoria, along with every other woman I invented, was dismissed with barely more than a glance—variations of “not good enough.”

He chose me instead.

My thoughts reverberate in the quiet room, dense with all the disbelief I still feel. Give me years of therapy and journaling and I still don’t think I’ll ever be able to explain quite what happened in that meeting.

I know exactly what I want .

Me? I wanted to laugh. Out of everyone you have access to, you want me ?

It’s not that I think I’m a dog or the bottom of the reject pile or anything. I’ve been on the dating apps enough to know that there are plenty of men willing to swipe right with nary a second thought.

But being chosen for an hour-long date and a few overpriced cocktails is a hell of a lot different than being chosen to carry someone’s future children.

Stefan is a billionaire. He could have his sperm overnighted to Paris and injected into some high-fashion model within the day if he wanted.

But he chose me.

Finally, I do laugh. I tip my head back and cackle. By the time the echo makes it back to me, it sounds thin and sad… and I’m not laughing anymore.

I drop my forehead onto my folded arms and let out a pitiful sob instead.

I’m descending into some kind of crazed, hysterical madness, but hey, it’s not like it matters, right? There’s no one around to witness it. I’m alone. Whether here at the office or at home, I’m alone. Everyone else has long since fled back to their neat, cozy little lives, safe in the knowledge that if I go belly up, they can jump overboard and find another career.

Not me, though. But I’ll be stuck here, going down with the wreckage of mine.

Suddenly, a blue pulse of light washes over my desk. I look up at my computer screen as a new email fills the screen. It’s from a patient named Georgia Hadley and labeled Urgent , which twists my stomach into familiar knots.

I only have to read the first line to know it’s not an email I want to finish.

Thanks for all of your help so far, Dr. Aster, but I’ve decided to move my care to the office of ⁠ —

I click out of the email before I can finish the sentence. No good can come of that. Besides, I already know what it was going to say.

I know exactly what I want. Do you?

Stefan’s voice echoes in my head. I can close my eyes and see the way he looked at me when he said it. Not at me— through me. He took one glance and knew it all, from the stress-bitten cuticles to the shamelessly reworn bra with the underwire that jabs me in the ribs every time I wriggle wrong.

My phone vibrates, and I’m so grateful for the distraction that I answer without checking the caller ID. Big mistake.

“Olivia, dear.” My mother’s voice slides through the speaker, too saccharine-sweet for my sour mood. “How are you?”

I blink, momentarily disoriented. My mother doesn’t call to ask how I am. She calls to inform me of fundraisers I should attend, connections I should make, or—most recently—how Walsh’s latest achievement has brought even more shame to my family name.

“I’m… fine. Is everything okay?” I straighten in my chair, immediately on alert.

“Can’t a mother call her daughter without an emergency?” She laughs. That’s weird in its own right—my mother would never lose control of herself enough to actually laugh. “I was thinking about you. How was your day?”

Call Area 51, because we’ve got a case of body snatchers.

My mother is calling to check on me at—I check the time—10:39 P.M.? That is definitely outside standard operating hours for Margaret Aster’s maternal instincts, if they exist at all.

“It was… productive,” I lie. “Busy with client consults.”

“Wonderful. And how’s the Hadley case progressing? The one with the endometriosis complication?”

I nearly drop the phone. My mother remembering a patient’s name? Asking for a follow-up? I feel like I’ve slipped into some parallel universe where Margaret Aster actually cares about my work. It’s unsettling.

“She’s responding well to treatment,” I say carefully. It’s not a lie. Georgia’s last appointment went well. I told her I was optimistic about her chances of conception this month.

Apparently, my optimism wasn’t enough to match whatever bargain barrel deal Walsh was able to waft under her nose. Loyalty is priceless… until it isn’t, I guess.

“Good, good,” she murmurs. I can almost hear her smiling. “I always said you had excellent clinical instincts. Like me.”

I fight the urge to snap my fingers and shout, A-ha! In thirty-two years, my mother has never offered unprompted praise without some kind of catch. At least that much hasn’t changed.

Tired of waiting for the trap to snap closed, I decide to be blunt. “Mom, what’s this about?”

She pauses. I picture her tapping her fingernails against her wine glass. “Brian Thompson’s wife told me the most interesting thing at Pilates today,” she says finally.

My stomach drops.

The president of the hospital board’s wife is getting spiritual in sound baths with Dr. Walsh, so I have zero reasons to believe whatever she had to say to my mother is going to be good news for me.

I brace for impact.

“She mentioned she saw you in the Safonov Holdings building today. Looking quite… flustered.” She lets the word hang, double meanings and euphemisms clawing over each other to get the first bite at me. “Were you there?”

“I—well, I—er, yes,” I stammer. I’m too exhausted to construct a believable lie. There are probably one thousand different security camera angles of me on Safonov property, so there really isn’t any point to lying anyway. “We had a meeting about a… a potential collaboration.”

I know exactly what I want. Do you?

I fight back the shiver that curls down my spine.

“Oh?”

That’s her fakest forced casualness yet. It tells me everything I need to know.

This is why she called. This is why she cares.

“The hospital board was just discussing his business ventures yesterday,” she mentions. “Stefan has such an impressive portfolio. And those eyes… Blue and brown. So striking.”

“Mom—” I try to interrupt, but she’s on a roll, and something about her enthusiasm makes my chest ache with a stupid, childish hope I thought I’d outgrown.

No matter how old you get, you always still want Mommy to love you. All the more so if she’s never done it before.

“He is rarely seen with women unless they’re exceptionally promising—socially or professionally.” The way she says it, I know she’d be fine with either choice. “He must see something special in you, Olivia.”

I should correct her. Tell her it’s not what she thinks. But the words get stuck in my throat because she sounds… proud. Of me. For once.

“It’s just business,” I manage weakly.

“Business and pleasure often mix well for successful people, darling. I’ve always told you that.”

“That’s not⁠—”

“The hospital board would absolutely love to know about your business with a man like Stefan Safonov,” she continues, ignoring my protest. “With his portfolio, and those eyes, he’d be a great business partner. In every sense of the word.”

I open my mouth, but no sound comes out.

“I always knew you had it in you, Olivia. All this time wasted on that little clinic when you could have been making the right connections.”

The warmth I’d felt moments ago curdles in my stomach. No matter what she says or how she says it, she’s not proud of my work. She’ll never be proud of my work.

She’s only excited about who I might be sleeping with.

“My clinic isn’t a waste of time,” I say, jaw clenched. “It’s my life’s work.”

The fact it’s currently circling the drain is a minor detail I won’t bother bringing up.

“Of course, darling,” she says dismissively. “But wouldn’t it be nice to have both your ‘work’—” She says it like it’s a hobby I’m taking up, like cross-stitching or whittling. “— and a man worth having? Someone who understands ambition?”

I ought to hang up. But that hopeful little girl in me that still yearns for her approval will take it in any form it can get—even if that form is wrapped in the barbed wire of backhanded compliments.

“I knew you’d find your way eventually. All those years of rebellion… But now…” She pauses, and I hold my breath. “I love you, you know. You’re finally becoming who you’re meant to be.”

Three decades of waiting for those words, and they come now, tangled up in her glowing approval of a man who looks at me like meat on a butcher’s block. A man who dismissed every perfect candidate because…

Because he wants me.

I make a mumbled excuse about a patient waiting and end the call before she can point out it’s nearing midnight and no patient of mine is even conscious right now.

I slam my phone down on my desk and look at Viktoria Fitzsimmons’s face again. Before I can stop myself, I grab the folders, twist in my office chair, and shove them into the shredder. The colored paper confetti fills the basket as, page after page, I destroy each file in turn.

Once I’m done, I follow the adrenaline rush back to my phone. Stefan’s name is at the top of my text threads.

The cursor blinks, waiting for my surrender.

I type: Tomorrow. 9 A.M.

The message is sent before I can second-guess it. Before I can shame myself for sending my dignity through the shredder in the name of survival.

I’m no better than Dr. Walsh. But maybe, if I can stomach the path I’ve chosen… I will be.

I empty the shredder bin into the large trash bag in the lobby. Evidence of the path not taken. The woman I couldn’t afford to be.

I throw it all in the dumpster on my way out.