Chapter 2 - The Secret Clinic
The night after the court hearing, the house felt like a cage.
Daniel was asleep, his chest rising and falling in rhythmic, heavy breaths, but I was wide awake, staring at the nursery ceiling.
I reached for my laptop, my fingers hovering over the search bar.
I had to know.
I had to find out what she meant by “supposed to be mine.”
I typed in the name of the clinic—The Sterling Institute—a place where we had spent our entire savings, a place where the doctors were ghosts, private and highly expensive.
I spent hours scrolling through encrypted files, looking for anything related to donor eggs or embryo storage.
My heart hammered against my ribs as I opened a folder labeled ‘Client Archive: 2024’.
There it was.
My name, my medical history, and—to my horror—a file labeled ‘Duplicate/Re-Routed Embryo Transfer.’
I clicked the link, the screen illuminating the dark room with a harsh, white light.
My blood stopped flowing in my veins.
The file detailed an error, a “clerical adjustment,” where two viable embryos—meant for my husband and me—had been split.
One had gone to me.
The other… had been redirected.
I looked at the address of the recipient.
It was Vanessa’s apartment.
She hadn't just been jealous; she had been carrying the other half of our dream, and something had gone horribly wrong.
The medical notes were frantic, handwritten by a doctor whose license had been revoked three months after my procedure.
‘Transfer successful for both patients. However, Patient B (Vanessa) is carrying the genetic material belonging to Patient A (Claire).’
I dropped the laptop onto the bed.
Vanessa wasn't just my sister.
She was carrying my baby.
She was pregnant with the child we had lost in the process, the child the clinic had told us was non-viable.
I sat in the dark, the weight of the revelation pressing down on me.
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She hadn't broken into my house because she was a monster.
She had broken in because she was a mother who believed her baby had been stolen by the system, and that I was the one who was living in the world that belonged to her child.
