Chapter 37
Elliot
The next patient’s file was on my desk. I checked it against her general practitioner’s summary of care record to ensure I didn't miss anything.
She was a healthy thirty-two-year-old with no underlying conditions.
But the thickness of the folder betrayed its unusual nature.
My thumb split the pages, skimming past routine vitals until I read the words NHS private donor service.
Interesting.
She didn’t have any fertility issues. She simply wanted to have a child on her own. Most women her age sourced donors through friends or university clinics. The NHS’s private service was reserved for…particular specimens—expensive ones, the kind with PhDs or distinct physical traits.
Ms Charlotte Hutton wanted to be a mother despite societal norms.
The lab results came next. Elevated proteins. Spiking blood pressure. The numbers screamed pre-eclampsia, but my gut whispered something else. Years of treating patients, yet this one stood out. Or perhaps it was the appeal of her desperation to become a mother.
His photo was on my desk and I stroked his cherub cheek through the glass.
Four years had passed, but the wound never healed.
I smoothed my tie, the one Julia had always hated and allowed myself one final look at Elias.
However, this pregnancy had come to be, whatever irregularities the tests showed, I would move heaven and earth to ensure Charlotte Hutton's child entered this world screaming and perfect.
Not just for her sake.
But because somewhere in the twisting corridors of my grief, I'd forgotten how to do anything else.
I messaged the radiologist and sonographer to advise them that I would conduct the next ultrasound. They could take a break. It was time to meet the young woman who was determined to become a mother.
When I called her name no one stood up. It was a large waiting room and I glanced at where the lady's toilets were. Frequent urination was prevalent in the final trimester. A few women were looking at me but no one stood up.
“Charlotte Hutton,” I called again with a frown.
“Present,” a husky voice said.
An auburn-haired woman pushed herself off the seat with her hand raised as she stood up.
While she said something to a woman beside her, I admired the view.
She wore black leggings with a bright mustard sweater.
My lips twitched because she looked as if she had swallowed the sun.
Due to her petite stature, she waddled toward me.
“Hello, I’m Dr. Vale,” I said with a smile while she cleared her throat. We will go straight for the ultrasound, and once I’ve taken a look, we can discuss the results.”
She nodded, but I saw the fear and concern in her soft hazel eyes. Her hand rested on her baby, and she rubbed it, soothing both.
“I am very thorough. You're in good hands, Ms Hutton,” I said before leading the way.
◆◆◆
The gel pooled warm against Charlotte’s abdomen, a stark contrast to the clinical chill of the examination room.
She lay there, this auburn-haired sprite of a woman, barely five feet of her stretched across the table, looking up at me with those wide, hazel eyes.
Eyes that held none of the knowing cruelty of my ex-wife, none of the weary suspicion most single mothers carried. Just trust—sweet, stupid trust.
Her breasts strained against the fabric of the knitted sweater, swollen with impending motherhood, the valley between them deepening with each breath.
The curve of her belly was a perfect arc beneath my gloved hands, taut and ripe as summer fruit.
I could have traced the roadmap of her stretch marks on that delicate skin and counted every freckle that dotted her collarbones like constellations.
But it wasn’t her body that fascinated me.
It was what grew inside it.
The transducer glided through the gel, and the screen flickered to life in grayscale static. For a moment, there was nothing but the vague shadow-play of limbs, the rhythmic pulse of the heartbeat. Then—movement.
The foetus turned.
A searing light erupted from the monitor, white as a star going supernova. I flinched, my grip tightening on the wand, but the image burned through my retinas, seared itself onto the backs of my eyelids. Not a blur of undeveloped features. Not some anonymous child.
Elias.
My son’s face—those impossible blue-and-yellow eyes, the mutation that had skipped generations only to land in him—stared back at me from the screen. His lips parted, not in the gummy smile of infancy, but in something sharper. Knowing.
“Da-da.”
The voice crackled through the ultrasound speakers, tinny and distorted, the sound of a child calling from the bottom of a well.
My breath lodged in my throat. The room tilted.
Then, as suddenly as it had come, the light dimmed.
The screen resolved into the ordinary shapes of a twenty-week scan—a spine like a string of pearls, the flutter of tiny fingers.
But I had seen it.
I had heard it.
My gloves creaked as my fists clenched. Charlotte shifted beneath my hands, her voice a distant buzz.
“Is everything alright, Doctor?”
I forced myself to smile, making my voice smooth as the gel on her skin.
“Perfect,” I murmured, dragging the transducer lower.
The lie came easily, polished by years of comforting undeserving mothers.
My pulse hammered against my collarbone, and my tie felt like a tightening noose.
My heart fluttered erratically like a trapped butterfly.
He was perfect.
My son. My Elias. Somehow, impossibly, here.
In Charlotte Hutton’s body.
And I would burn the universe down to keep him.
I focused on the task and continued to do what I’d done countless times. Only this time, my heart pumped too fast, and my hand trembled. I took my time and inspected every inch of my perfect boy before switching to the Doppler to gauge the blood flow in the uterine arteries.
No, no, no, no, no.
My mind cried when I saw the spikes—high resistance.
“Doctor?” she whispered.
Her eyes were wide, and her hands clutched her sweater until her knuckles were white.
When her lips began to tremble and her eyes shone with tears, I knew I had to pull myself together.
She couldn’t know that I would rip this child from her womb myself before I let history repeat itself.
Before I buried another tiny coffin in the family plot.
I remained silent, printing the falsified results with steady hands. The transducer captured every angle, every curve of him—my Elias, suspended in that woman’s unworthy flesh. I handed Charlotte paper towels, watching as she smeared the gel in haphazard circles.
“Just a moment,” I murmured, stepping into the hall—three phone calls. Three favours called in. By the time I returned, my schedule had been cleared like a surgical field.
Back in my office, I recited the pre-eclampsia risks, my voice smooth as the lie. “Headaches. Swelling. Vision changes.”
Charlotte nodded, clutching the leaflet like a rosary.
Follow her.
The command slithered through my mind, sticky as amniotic fluid.
Don’t let her out of your sight.
My pen froze mid-sentence. That voice—too high. Too young. Not mine. Not ever mine.
Across the desk, Charlotte smiled, oblivious. “Thank you, Doctor. I feel so much better.”
The leaflet crinkled in her hands. The sound echoed like a heartbeat on Doppler.
Liar, the voice whispered. She’s lying.
And for the first time in four years, I wasn’t alone. Not any more.
When the door closed behind her, I grabbed my car keys and suit jacket.