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“I guess I’ll just explain as you go,” she said quietly. “That right there is a contract.”
I blinked, my eyes trying to focus on the words.
Contract of conception between Lacy F. Murillo and Lisbeth and Farrell Pegues.
I frowned, my eyes going over the information.
Lisbeth and Farrell hired me over eight years ago to find their missing child that their surrogate had stolen. One second they’d been celebrating their pending arrival, and the next, they were searching everywhere for their missing surrogate.
The surrogate had been twenty-four-year-old Lacy Murillo of Boise, Idaho.
Lacy and Lisbeth had been best friends since they were children, so Lisbeth had told me she’d felt overly confident in her best friend doing the right thing when it came to her child.
What was brand new in the file was a second contract.
The first contract had been from their first IVF attempt. The second contract was from their fourth.
“The differences in the contract are highlighted in the next frame. See if you can spot the differences yourself, though, in the two contracts before you move on to the second screen,” she urged.
So I did, reading them line by line.
I didn’t see it at first.
Not until she told me to go ahead and move on to the third screen that showed the differences between the two contracts.
I sucked in a breath.
For the first contract, it said mother/egg retrieval as/from “Lisbeth Pegues.” However, for the second, it showed mother/egg retrieval as/from “Lacy Murillo.”
What. The. Fuck?
I went to the contracts to double-check, and sure enough, the names were different.
I frowned hard.
“Which one of these did you find, and which one did I have originally?” I asked.
“Original,” she showed me the second one. “This is the one you were given. This is the one that I supplied for you.”
I frowned even harder.
“How many attempts were there again?” I asked.
“Four,” she answered.
I nodded and moved on, my confusion already rolling like a black cloud through my veins.
Why would the mothers/egg retrievals be one person for the first three and another on the last? And why would I be told about the one but not the other?
The rest of the file was fairly standard. When I’d first started looking for the pregnant woman and eventually the child that she would have, I was given information.
Name—Lacy Murillo.
Age at the time—twenty-three.
Sex—female
Last known location: Boise, Idaho.
