Part one

At twenty-four weeks pregnant, I got a three-line email.

“Jenna, Rachel and I are separating. I no longer wish to be a party to the surrogacy agreement. My lawyer will contact the agency. Sorry. Owen.”

I was sitting in my car, in the parking lot of the dental office in Scarborough where I work as a hygienist. The baby kicked, right under my ribs, as if to say she’d been reading over my shoulder.

I called Rachel. She picked up on the sixth ring. She was crying.

“I can’t, Jenna. I can’t raise her alone. Not the child of a man who’s leaving me. I’m sorry. I’m so sorry.”

She hung up.

The baby I was carrying no longer had any parents.

I should explain how you end up there.

I’m thirty-one. I live in Scarborough, in the east end of Toronto, with my husband, Kyle, who’s an electrician, and our two kids, Mason, seven, and Lily, four. My pregnancies were easy. I’ve always known it: my body is good at this, the way some people are good at piano.

My cousin Brianna lost her uterus at twenty-nine, after cancer. I watched her cry in front of the strollers at the mall. She’s the one who gave me the idea. Not for her, she had already adopted. For someone else.

In Canada, surrogacy is legal, but you’re not allowed to be paid for it. They reimburse your expenses, with receipts: vitamins, maternity clothes, gas to get to appointments. Nothing more. I didn’t want anything more. I wanted to give somebody what I already had.

The agency introduced us to Rachel and Owen Whitford last spring, in a café in Leslieville. Her, forty-one, a lawyer at a big Bay Street firm, perfect suits and eyes that never let go of mine. Him, forty-three, an architect, funny, charming, the kind of man who remembers your kids’ names the first time you meet.

Rachel had had cervical cancer at thirty-six. Hysterectomy. They had left her ovaries. They had made embryos at a fertility clinic downtown. There was one left, just one, tested and viable. Owen had shown it to us on the clinic’s patient portal, with a huge smile.

“It’s our last chance,” Rachel had said. “I’m not asking you to give it to us. I’m asking you to carry it.”

I said yes before she had finished her coffee.

Kyle took longer. He asked the real questions, the ones I didn’t want to hear: the risks, the nausea, what we’d tell the kids, what would happen if it went wrong. Then he read the surrogacy agreement, line by line, with a yellow highlighter, at the kitchen table. After three evenings, he closed the folder and said, “Okay. But I’m the one who rubs your feet.”

The transfer took the first time. Rachel cried in the ultrasound room when we heard the heartbeat. She sent me flowers every month, and lists of names. Owen came to appointments when Rachel was in court. He brought doughnuts and iced coffees for the staff.

At the twenty-week scan, the one where they check everything, Rachel was arguing a case in Ottawa. Owen came with a woman I didn’t know. About thirty, dark-haired, quiet, a camel coat.

“My cousin Tessa,” he said. “She’s a nurse. She wanted to see this.”

Tessa sat down at the back of the room. Through the whole exam, she never took her eyes off the screen. When the tech said, “It’s a girl,” she put her hand over her mouth and cried, silently, harder than Owen. At the end, she came over and asked me, almost in a whisper:

“Does she move a lot? At night?”

I found it touching, a cousin so moved. I told Kyle about it that same evening. He said, “People get weird about babies.”

Four weeks later came the email.

Over the following days, I learned things I never wanted to know.

In Ontario, at birth, the surrogate is the legal mother. The intended parents only become the parents once she gives written consent, at least seven days after the delivery. If nobody wants the child, she stays mine. And if I can’t keep her, the Children’s Aid Society takes over, and she’s placed for adoption.

Kyle was amazing. He said we’d manage, that we had room, that a third kid was only a bedroom to repaint. But I saw his eyes at night, over the bills. And I saw Mason, who had told his whole class that his mom was “making a baby for a sick lady.”

“So where does she go now, the baby?” he asked me.

I didn’t know what to say.

At twenty-six weeks, the follow-up ultrasound showed a small bright spot in the baby’s heart. The doctor said it was almost always harmless, but she wanted to refer us to a genetic counselor at the hospital on University Avenue.

I wrote to Rachel. Just a factual message, because on paper she was still her daughter. I didn’t expect an answer.

She came.

She was sitting in the waiting room, no makeup, in jeans, smaller than I remembered. She didn’t dare hug me. She looked at my belly the way you look at a house where you were once happy.

The genetic counselor was a round, gentle woman who spoke slowly. She opened the fertility clinic’s file on her screen, scrolled through it, and turned to Rachel with a professional smile.

“To complete the assessment, I’ll need the family history of the egg donor. Are you still in touch with her?”

Rachel didn’t move.

“What donor?” she said.