Chapter 10 - The Woman He Was Not Choosing Either
Diana met Evelyn in Marsha’s office on a rainy Thursday afternoon.
She was smaller than Evelyn expected, pale from medication, with tired brown eyes and a navy coat buttoned to the throat. She did not look like a woman about to claim a baby. She looked like a woman who had spent several months realizing she had been used and was ashamed of how long it took.
“I’m sorry,” she said before she sat down. “I should have demanded proof that you knew.”
Evelyn did not say it was okay.
Diana opened her bag and took out the notarized letter Nathan had sent her. It gave him sole discretion over the timing and nature of her involvement with the child. It also described Evelyn as “fragile regarding maternal identity” and likely to “experience destabilization after delivery.”
Marsha read it slowly.
“He was preparing to pathologize her before she even gave birth,” she said.
Diana nodded.
“That’s not the worst part.”
Nathan had told Diana that Evelyn had no usable eggs after the second failed cycle. He said donor eggs were the only way his marriage could survive. He claimed Evelyn had chosen Diana specifically because she didn’t want an anonymous donor and trusted Nathan’s history with her.
Diana agreed to donate because she believed she was helping a married couple have a child—not helping a husband deceive his wife.
Then, three weeks before the due date, Nathan’s story changed. He started talking about Evelyn “pulling away,” “romanticizing biology,” and maybe needing “time apart” after delivery. He asked Diana whether she would be willing, eventually, to be more visible in Lucy’s life.
“I told him that wasn’t what I agreed to,” Diana said. “He got angry. He said after everything he’d done, I was abandoning him again.”
Evelyn stared at her.
“Again?”
Diana gave a thin, sad smile.
“I ended things with him years ago because he turned love into a project. If he couldn’t control the future, he tried to draft it.”
That was the twist that made every earlier clue lock into place.
Nathan had not engineered the donor cycle because he was nobly torn between two women.
He had engineered it because he believed he could manage both women into staying where he wanted them: Evelyn as wife and birth mother, Diana as genetic donor and unresolved first love, Lucy as the child who would bind them all to him.
The labor-room confession had not been truth breaking loose.
It had been panic.
Diana slid the letter across the desk.
“If I testify, I blow up my own life too,” she said. “But if I don’t, he keeps calling this a misunderstanding.”
Evelyn looked down at Lucy’s stroller parked by the wall.
May you like
Then she made the difficult choice.
“Testify,” she said. “I’d rather my daughter have a complicated truth than his version of peace.”
