Nine Months to Bear By Nicole Fox - 8

8

My office feels smaller today. I could almost swear the walls are closing in on me with each breath.

When I close my eyes, a different scene swims to life behind my eyelids. My white plaster office is gone; in its place is a long alleyway of cement. I can hear the bang of bullets leaving the chamber, feel his firm hands guiding mine on the gun, his chest pressed against my back, the heat of him seeping through my clothes.

You want a child? Try Tinder. But if you think I’ll sell my soul for your checkbook…

Those were my exact words to him. I delivered them with God-sent righteousness burning through my veins, chin lifted, shoulders squared. For one glorious moment, I felt powerful.

Then his eyes turned to ice.

“You need me, Dr. Aster. I don’t need you.”

And he was fucking right.

That’s what infuriates me. Not just his arrogance or his obscene proposal, but that for one shameful second, I considered it.

I stare at the white orchids in my window—the ones I arranged so carefully only this morning, before everything went to hell. Their petals curl inward like they’re pouting, as if even the plants know better than to bloom for me today.

What kind of doctor am I, that I’d even contemplate selling a woman’s body to save my practice? My mother would be appalled. Not at the ethical breach—God knows she wouldn’t give a damn about that. She’d be enraged at my failure to close the deal.

Failing because of your morals is still failing, Olivia.

“Earth to Dr. A.” Camille throws a stress ball shaped like a uterus at my head. My office manager-slash-head nurse-slash-occasional-life-coach looks like a 1950s pinup girl went to business school, with her victory rolls and sharp pencil skirts. Right now, her winged eyeliner is narrowed in concern. “You’ve been staring at those flowers for twenty minutes. Either they insulted your mother or something happened at that meeting. And, no offense to your mom, but you wouldn’t be that upset if someone insulted her.”

I catch the flying uterus mid-air and squeeze it until the fallopian tubes bulge. “Nothing happened.”

“Oh, sure, sure.” Camille closes the door and drops into the pink velvet visitor’s chair. “That’s why you’re all scrunchy-faced and frowny and smell like you just had sex with a musket.” She pauses. “Wait. Did he actually⁠—?”

“If you ask if I had sex with a weapon, you’re fired.”

Camille’s brows lunge upward, asking the question her mouth no longer can.

“He had a private shooting range in his basement.” My sigh turns into a hollow laugh. Talk about a red flag. “Apparently, I needed lessons in self-defense before we could discuss business.”

“Because of Frederick?” Camille shivers as if she was the one twice assaulted at the gala last night. “God, what a creep. Not Stefan—Frederick. You get it.” She waves an impatient hand at me and herself. “Anyway. Well?”

“And I learned that Russian billionaires have interesting ideas about foreplay.”

“So you did have sex!”

“No!” Heat crawls up my neck as Camille’s eyebrows hit her hairline. “That was a joke. It’s not— I— He just showed me how to shoot. With his hands on my—” I stop, trapped by Camille’s knowing smirk. “Can we focus on the actual problem?”

“You mean your inability to tell a compelling story?” She groans. “I’m getting absolutely nothing over here. Where are the raunchy details?”

If I still have a business in two months, I should invest in an HR department. This place is toxic.

“The actual problem is that Stefan Safonov wants me to traffic him a womb, Cami.”

“Ooh, trafficking! That’s new. Black market or white glove delivery?”

“This isn’t funny. And it’s not a joke. He wants me to find a woman to give him an heir. ” I shiver at the words, as if saying them will summon Stefan like the Russian Beetlejuice. “That isn’t our business model. It’s the literal exact opposite of our mission statement.”

I spent weeks drafting and rewriting the “About Us” section of my website. I can still rattle off the first paragraph by heart.

At Aster Fertility Solutions, we empower women to take control of their reproductive journey on their own terms. We believe that creating a family should never be limited by circumstances, but guided by personal choice and supported by compassionate expertise.

Or, in this case, it can be guided by financial desperation and the whims of a billionaire. To-may-to, to-mah-to.

Camille sobers up, at least insofar as she ever does. “Gross. Imperial surrogacy with an extra side of ethical nightmare.”

“Basically.” I pull Stefan’s proposal from my bag and slide it across the desk. I watch Camille’s expressions do a downward spiral as she reads the taped-together pages.

“So we’re talking full Handmaid’s Tale , but with better tailoring. What’d you tell him?” Camille asks.

“To choke on it.”

“Classy. And how’s that working with—” She flips open my laptop, revealing another overdraft alert. “—our imminent bankruptcy?”

In case I doubted the universe’s sense of humor, an email hits my inbox at that exact moment. It’s a new message from Dr. Walsh’s office— Thank you for referring Mrs. Alvarez! Attached is a photo of my former client grinning beside Walsh’s gold-embossed sign in her foyer.

I feel sick.

“Goddamn vulture,” Camille mutters over my shoulder. “She poached Alvarez? That’s our third traitor this week.”

“Fifth, actually.” I massage my temples, trying to work away the perma-headache that lives behind my eyes these days. “The Vasquez twins went over to the dark side yesterday.”

“Jesus. I didn’t know about them.” Camille collapses back in her chair, looking downright dejected. “They were weirdos, but they were our big break. Everyone wanted to know about the identical twins who wanted identical babies.”

“Well, now, they’re Walsh’s newest testimonial.” I pull up their joint Instagram account, a feed dedicated to matching outfits and the identical sister-cousins I should’ve helped them create. But the most recent post shows both sisters tagged in a glowing review of their “new fertility journey” with Walsh’s clinic. “She offered them a two-for-one discount on their next round.”

“How can she even afford those rates? She’s practically giving treatments away.”

Camille is fuming, but I already mourned this loss in the bathtub this weekend. I drowned my denial in bubbles and my rage in a bottle of pinot grigio.

Now, I’m in the barren wasteland of acceptance. It sucks here.

“Because unlike us, she has backers. Dr. Walsh has deep pockets fueling her expansion.” I lean forward, dropping my face into my hands and talking through my fingers. “Word is that she’s sleeping with some angel investor for a new, on-site embryology lab. It’s going to be state-of-the-art equipment we could never dream of affording.”

We stare at the peeling “Hope Grows Here!” mural I had painted on the lobby wall during our first week open. The pastel red flowers are now cracking like dried blood.

Those cracks in the foundation are visible. The invisible ones are just as bad, though. The rent check for this office is due in two weeks. Our equipment lease payment bounced last month. The pharmaceutical rep who used to bring us lunch and free samples doesn’t even return my calls anymore.

Things have never been grimmer.

“Remember when we had a waiting list?” I whisper, talking like we’re already at the wake. “When women would fly in from other states because we had the highest success rate on the East Coast?”

“We still have the highest success rate,” Camille retorts. “Walsh stole all of your research, remember? As far as I’m concerned, her successes are yours, too, Liv. The trouble is that she opened that monstrosity across town with canapés and custom sound baths, and her clients don’t know she’s a crook.”

I feel the familiar rage bubbling up—the betrayal still fresh despite two years having passed. Dr. Rebecca Walsh had been my mentor. I’d trusted her with everything because, for a fleeting second there, she was like the mother I never had. Kind, encouraging, impressed. I craved her approval and shared my innovative protocols, my client stories, my dreams of helping women who everyone else had written off as hopeless cases.

Then she took it all and called it hers.

I’m still reeling.

Camille is the one to break the silence. “What if… we play his game? Just once. What if⁠—”

“No.”

“Hear me out.”

“I don’t need to hear you out.” I’ve heard her argument in my head already. I’ve been chasing it in circles like a dog chasing a morally repugnant tail.

“This isn’t what we do, but that doesn’t mean we can’t find a surrogate ethically. We find someone who needs the money as much as we do. No coercion, just… mutually beneficial exploitation.”

“We don’t exploit people. Period. That’s Walsh’s brand, not ours,” I snap, standing up to pace. “We started this clinic because we believed in doing things differently. In treating women like people, not incubators.”

“Give it another few weeks and we won’t be treating anyone!” Camille slaps my desk, eyes wide and pleading. “We’re down to three clients, Liv. Three . And Ms. Chopard’s daughter starts college next month. You think she’ll keep paying for fertility treatments when her daughter’s tuition is due?”

Ms. Chopard has been on our roster for years. She wants a baby more than anyone I’ve ever seen and she has the money to keep trying, no matter how many times I tell her it might be fruitless. But everyone reaches their limit of disappointment.

Believe me; I fucking know.

My throat tightens. It’s been five long years of fighting tooth and nail for every patient, every success, every tiny victory against infertility. All of it is slipping away now because I can’t compete with Walsh’s chain of baby factories and their shadowy investor backing.

“Our vendors have put us on credit hold,” Camille continues, pulling up our accounting software. The numbers glow an angry red on the screen. “We can’t order more hormones for Ms. Chopard’s next cycle. We can’t even afford to run the genetic tests we promised the Kims.”

I know all of this. I combed through all of these numbers this weekend before the gala. Before I ran into Stefan Safonov. None of this is new.

So why does it feel like more stress is being heaped on my shoulders?

“I’ll figure something out,” I mutter, knowing even as I say it how empty it sounds. I haven’t figured anything out so far.

“When? We have exactly eighteen days before our clinic license renewal fee is due. Eighteen days, Liv. And we are—” She jabs at the screen. “—twenty-three thousand dollars short.”

My gaze drifts to Ms. Chopard’s file on my desk—forty-two years old, single, desperate for a baby boy after two decades of miscarriages and false starts. Her adopted daughter, Lila, is twenty-two, pre-med, and eighty-five grand deep in student loans that she stubbornly refuses to let her mother pay.

Camille leans in, the devil on my shoulder. “Lila’s healthy. Smart. She offered to donate eggs last month, remember?”

“No,” I croak. “I turned her down. And besides, this is different.”

Lila is practically a kid. I told her donating eggs was a big commitment, but it’s nothing compared to renting out her entire uterus.

“Liv, this isn’t a lifelong prison sentence we’re pitching. Safonov’s kid would have nannies, security, and a trust fund bigger than God’s. Meanwhile, we could save this clinic and fund Lila’s education. It’s the least shitty option in a shitstorm.”

“You want me to approach our client’s daughter about carrying a child for the Russian mob.” I snort derisively.

The fact we’re even having this conversation shows how bad things are. This is insane.

“I want us to survive , babe.” Camille stands and moves to the window. Outside, Boston traffic crawls past our Aster Fertility Solutions sign. Like the mural in here, the gold lettering is starting to peel. That’s what I get for ordering it from a discount site. “Everything you’ve built here—all the women you help—it dies if we close.”

My mother’s voice echoes in my head: Doctors don’t fail, Olivia. Daughters do. The weight of her legacy, of the expectations I put on myself because of her, of the responsibility of being the only child of a driven, accomplished woman settles on my shoulders like lead.

I was seven when I first truly understood what failure meant to Dr. Margaret Aster. I got an A- in penmanship—just one teensy little minus sign—and she’d woken me up at the crack of dawn on a Saturday, taken me to her home office, and pulled out her own medical school report cards.

I wasn’t surprised by what I saw: straight As, perfect attendance, student council president. The list of accolades never ended.

“Success isn’t an accident, Olivia,” she’d said in a flat, dead-eyed voice. “It’s a choice. One you make every single day.”

That night, she bought me a calligraphy set and worksheets. Every evening for the next year, I practiced my letters for an hour. My mother checked each page before I was allowed to go to bed.

That spring, my hard work paid off. I won the penmanship award at school. Her smile lasted exactly three seconds before it slipped back into her usual mask of indifference and she asked about next semester’s science fair.

Twenty-two years later, I’m still chasing that three-second smile.

Problem is, the choices I’ve made so far have landed us here, on the doorstep of ruin. I’ve tried to do the right thing, to be good. I’ve tried to make everyone proud, to never falter, never fail.

Maybe it’s time to try something else.

Like she can sense my resolve weakening, Camille leans against my shoulder. She gives me a squeeze. “Liv, this thing with Safonov—I’m not saying it’s right. But it is a lifeline. All it would take is this one client. One big payday, and then, boom —we’re back in the game. We’d have the money to help all the women who need us, all the women and families we went into business for in the first place.”

I sigh. “By helping one rich man buy a baby.”

I feel disgusting even saying it.

She shakes her head. “No, by helping one rich man have a family while saving the futures of countless other families in the process. It’s not pretty—maybe we won’t put it on our company Christmas card, you know?—but it is pragmatic.”

I close my eyes, and I’m in that gun range again. Stefan’s hand is on my waist, his other hand curled around my fingers.

It could be yours. I could hand it to you on a silver fucking platter without even blinking. Or it could vanish. Without me, everything you’ve built collapses within six weeks. It’s your choice: financial ruin, or one simple favor.

“I won’t do it without a full psychological eval,” I say abruptly, trying to drown out the rumbling baritone in my head. “Plus independent legal counsel for Lila. And Safonov doesn’t get to interview her like she’s breeding stock. I’ll handle the communication between them myself.”

Camille practically squeals as she jumps up, clapping her hands in delight. “I’ll draft the paperwork!”

“This is wrong,” I breathe. “So goddamn wrong.”

“You know better than anyone that medicine is messy, Liv, as much as we like to pretend otherwise. It’s complicated, and all you can do is help the people you can. At least this mess keeps the lights on. At least it gives you a future where you can do more good.”

She hurries towards the door like she’s going to print everything out before I can change my mind.

Outside the window, thunder growls. Compromise , my mother’s voice sneers, is just failure with a press release . She always had a quote ready to illustrate exactly how wayward and lost I would be without her guidance. I used to wonder if she wrote them herself or if she had a book somewhere with thousands of them locked and loaded.

My hands shake as I open my desk drawer and pull out the business card Stefan pressed into my hand at the gala. It sits in my palm so innocently—but God, the edges are sharp.

I look up at the orchids where they observe silently from the windowsill.

“What?” I protest. “I haven’t done anything yet.”

Their petals are still perfect, still pure. But in the eerie glow of the storm rolling in, they cast shadows like bloodstains across my desk.