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“But you laid all of it out in these papers.” She lowered her voice until I had to strain to hear her over the gentle lap of the water against the sea wall. “You want me to get pregnant, and you want to pay me for my baby. Like I was some broodmare.”
“A chicken and a broodmare. Nice to know how you see yourself.”
“How I see myself? Um, no. That’s all you, bucko.”
I nearly smiled. I would have if this wasn’t so important. “I want to pay you for your time. The gestation period is lengthy, and the change in your lifestyle for that period is worth compensation.”
“So you keep saying,” she said, sounding more shrill by the minute.
“Which brings me back to the reason I asked you to sit down again in the diner. I was knocked off-course, but you’ve reminded me once again. Age. You’re twenty-eight. Egg validity is an important concern.”
“Egg what?”
“Validity. Once a woman nears thirty, her eggs start becoming—”
“Dude, you did not just call my eggs old. You’re fucking lucky you walked out when you did because if you were still here, I’d slap you until you came to your senses.”
“You’d be slapping me for a while then, because I’ve thought a lot about this. For months actually. It’s a sensible idea, and once you take some time to calm down and think, I have a feeling you’ll agree. College is expensive, and this way you’ll be covered. Any school you like,” I reminded her. “And Laurie will have that sibling we both know she desperately wants.”
“Cheap shot,” she said in an undertone. “Using that little girl to get your way is the lowest of lows. But I should expect nothing else from a fabled Hamilton, now should I?”
Wincing, I gripped the phone tighter. “Wait. That didn’t come out right. I meant—”
She’d already ended the call.
Immediately, I called her back, but it went straight to voicemail. I braced my elbow on the roof of my car and shut my eyes, hearing her pained voice on repeat in my head.
Hating every second.
“Fuck,” I muttered, stepping back and yanking open my door.
Maybe I wouldn’t have to worry about her saying no. God knows I’d bungled this situation in every possible way. And I might have screwed up more than just my slim chances of her agreeing to my plan.
I might have just lost my best friend too.
3
Ally
I stared at the ceiling and frowned at the watermark in the corner. Had that been there before? I covered my face with my arms and pulled my knees up to my chest as I stretched out my back.
I’d been on the floor for the last ten minutes. Mostly because my furniture was either packed or sold off. If the five dollar college student special counted as sold anyway.
My day had started at five in the morning to open the diner, then I’d gone right to my—no, not mine anymore. The house. Now, the only thing familiar were the ghostly shapes from my mother’s old medical equipment in the battered hardwood.
Hospice had come to collect them last month and I hadn’t had the heart to come back into her space since then.
I held my hand up to catch the speckled bits of sunlight that peeked from the trees surrounding this corner of the house. Dust motes danced through the fading rays as I dropped my arms over my knees to pull them closer.
My body ached almost as much as my head. Between the long hours at the Rusty Spoon and packing up the house, I hadn’t had time to do anything more than fall on my face in sheer exhaustion. Lather-rinse-and-repeat.
Okay, so maybe some of it was to avoid thinking about Seth’s question.
Because if I was so tired I was blind, I didn’t have to re-read the two page contract that he had tucked behind my tentative house sale contract.
I released my knees and sprawled out on the floor spread eagle. What the hell had he been thinking?
I was obviously going to say no. There was no way I could contemplate having his baby for a college education. First of all…paying me to be his broodmare was archaic. Second, I couldn’t survive it.
