Page 11 of The One Who Never Left: Colter

Desperate for caffeine and emotional triage, Sutton fled to the only place in town equipped to handle both—the local coffeehouse—Espresso Yourself.

Espresso Yourself stood out like a sleek espresso shot in a sea of prairie dust. The only modern building on Main Street, its clean lines and floor-to-ceiling windows clashed charmingly with the weathered wood and brick of the surrounding storefronts.

Lynlee was wearing a sweet sundress covered in sunflowers, the hem fluttering just above her knees, with little pink sneakers scuffed from the day’s adventures. Her hair was pulled back into two playful pigtails, each tied with a ribbon that matched the dress, and she carried her favorite stuffed pony, Sir Neighs a Lot, tucked under one arm, like a tiny general leading an expedition.

Sutton had spent nearly fifteen minutes talking to Lynlee’s new teacher about her daughter’s first day, which was a timespan most four-year-olds would have staged a revolt. Not her four-year-old.

Lynlee had the patience of Job, the determination of a hall monitor, and the vocabulary of someone twice her age, which explained why—even though she had a lisp—she preferred to talk to adults rather than her peers. Not that it stopped her from making friends. Lynlee could strike up a conversation with a tree stump and make it feel like the most interesting thing in the world.

The day Sutton graduated from her vet tech program—one major pivot from pre-med, and approximately nine million sleepless hours in the making—she'd packed up her life and moved Lynlee away from her friends and everything that was familiar.

The plan consisted of two parts. First, find out what kind of man Colter Callahan was and second, the part she held closer, the part that was entirely her own was to someday finish her medical degree, build a client base, and have a pediatric clinic with her name on the door, preceded by the letters D, R, period.

She had a whole spreadsheet for it—color-coded, annotated, and ruthlessly optimistic. The spreadsheet was currently buried under a grocery list and one rainbow-colored crayon horse, which felt about right because all that sounded reachable and beautifully noble right up until she remembered how she got here.

It had started, as most of life's great disasters did, with the best of intentions. She'd been nineteen, broke, and in possession of a uterus the medical establishment considered prime real estate. The surrogacy agency had presented it as practically heroic.

Give the gift of life, fund your future, and change a family forever.

The brochure had commanding font, perfect pictures of perfect families, and impossible promises to keep, but she'd signed the contract anyway.

She'd done everything right. The physicals, the psych eval, the injections, even the monitoring appointments where she'd sat in paper gowns under fluorescent lighting while various professionals confirmed that her body was, in fact, doing what bodies were supposed to do.

Gold star, Sutton. Excellent uterine performance.

By month four, she'd started talking to the baby. Not in a maternal or possessive way, just the quiet, factual kind. Things like, “Your parents are very excited to meet you,” “I made you a good deal on a forever home,” “You're going to be just fine,” became the norm.

It all changed with a single call from the lab. They had made a mistake. And not some small, paperwork-level mistake. It was gigantic, spectacular, career-ending, you-will-be-hearing-from-our-lawyers kind of mistake that shattered dreams and ruined lives. As it turned out, the sample used hadn't been the intended father's. The sperm used was from a donor—and anonymous, unknown, number on a form somewhere in a filing cabinet donor.

The baby wasn't biologically from the couple who had hired her. As planned, the egg had been Sutton’s, but the sperm was Colter’s.

Sutton had sat across from the intended parents in a conference room that smelled of burned coffee and bad news, listening to them explain, with remarkable composure, that they could not proceed as planned, and that this wasn't what they'd agreed to. They were so very sorry but biology mattered.

“Even more important than being parents?” Sutton had asked.

The husband had said, “This changes everything.” It was like the baby was a renovation gone wrong—a load-bearing wall they'd discovered too late into the process.

She had a heartbeat, Sutton had thought, very calmly, while the words washed over her. She has a heartbeat and she talks to me at midnight and she might have my red hair or stubborn side. And she might have someone else’s eyes and smile. I don't know whose yet, but it doesn’t matter because she’s not a renovation.

Sutton had driven home from that meeting in the quiet hollow of someone who had just watched the floor drop out from under a life plan and was waiting for her organs to catch up.

With practiced gentleness and a box of tissues within reach, the caseworker had laid out three options:

Terminate.

Adoption.

Keep her.

The last one was said carefully, like it was a long shot—and if that wasn’t a heartbreaker, Sutton didn’t know what was.

She’d grown up in foster care and knew in her bones what it felt like to be the child nobody came back for. To be passed from placement to placement and told, in every way that wasn't words, that she wasn't quite enough to make someone stay.

She wasn't doing that to this baby. Because somewhere between the paper gowns and the midnight conversations and the moment she'd felt the first kick like a tiny fist knocking on a door—the baby had stopped being their baby and started being hers in every way that mattered and several that terrified her.

She'd signed the paperwork to keep her and cried the whole drive home, then ordered a pizza and eaten it alone on her apartment floor while calculating how many pre-med credits she'd already completed and whether this was actually survivable.

Spoiler alert: barely.