Chapter 10 - The Major Twist Was Not the Egg
Khloe thought the major twist was that Isabella’s egg had been used.
It wasn’t.
The larger truth emerged when the clinic reconstructed the entire cycle.
Isabella’s directed-donor eggs had been retrieved months before Khloe’s transfer.
Four had fertilized.
Two embryos reached blastocyst stage.
One was transferred to Khloe.
The second was frozen.
Khloe stared at the report.
“There’s another embryo?”
Priya nodded.
“Apparently.”
“Where?”
“Still in storage.”
Marcus leaned forward.
“Under whose account?”
Priya hesitated.
“That’s the problem.”
The embryo had originally been logged under Isabella’s donor record.
After Khloe’s successful pregnancy test, billing responsibility was moved to Khloe’s patient account.
But no valid signed directive transferred disposition authority.
In plain language:
An embryo genetically created from Isabella’s egg and Marcus’s sperm was sitting in frozen storage.
Marcus went white.
“My sperm?”
“Yes.”
He stood so quickly his chair nearly fell.
Khloe looked at him.
The room seemed to tilt.
During treatment, Marcus had provided sperm samples for their IVF cycle.
If Dr. Wallace used one of those samples with Isabella’s donated eggs, then the embryo was genetically related to Marcus and Isabella.
Khloe was carrying one.
Another still existed.
Nobody had ever told Marcus his sperm was being used with Isabella’s eggs specifically.
The betrayal expanded again.
Marcus wasn’t merely the husband whose wife had been deceived.
His reproductive material had been used outside the scope he believed he authorized.
Priya continued carefully.
“The clinic is not taking a position yet on legal disposition. They’ve frozen all action.”
Khloe asked the question nobody wanted.
“Did Isabella know about the second embryo?”
Silence.
Then Priya slid over another message.
Isabella had known.
Not only known.
Three months earlier, she had contacted Dr. Wallace asking whether the remaining embryo could be preserved indefinitely “until family circumstances stabilize.”
Marcus stared.
“What family circumstances?”
Priya shook her head.
“We don’t know yet.”
Khloe did.
Or thought she did.
Isabella’s business.
The trust.
The legal interpretation.
Then Marcus remembered something.
Two months earlier, Isabella had joked at dinner:
“If you two stop at one, I’ll have to carry the spare.”
Everyone laughed.
Khloe had rolled her eyes.
Marcus had changed the subject.
Now the joke looked different.
Khloe felt sick.
“Did she want to carry it?”
Priya raised one hand.
“We do not have evidence of an actual transfer plan.”
That mattered.
No invented certainty.
No sensational accusation beyond the records.
But Isabella had asked about preservation.
And she had hidden the embryo’s existence from both genetic contributors as they understood themselves.
Three earlier clues reinterpreted at once:
The burgundy pouch.
The trust inquiry.
The missing camera footage.
Isabella wasn’t terrified only that Khloe had discovered the origin of her pregnancy.
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She was terrified Khloe had found paperwork proving a second embryo existed.
An embryo Isabella had begun thinking about as hers.
