Chapter 7
CHAPTER SEVEN
BILLION
Money had never been the hard part, not in my family. The hard part was deciding what something was worth when there wasn’t really a price you could put on it.
I stood in front of the windows in my office looking out over the back of the property.
From upstairs, on the fourth floor I could see damn near everything.
The pool, the guesthouse sitting farther back, the covered patio Kaizleigh had spent too much money having redone and barely used the shit, and enough grass for me to question why the fuck we’d bought a house with this much of it in the first place.
Somewhere downstairs, I could hear my wife moving around.
We had a meeting with the attorneys later that afternoon, and there was one thing we still hadn’t settled.
The exact amount we were paying Nyrobi. We’d always said over a hundred thousand though.
That was enough to let her know the type of money we were talking without throwing numbers around before we knew whether she would even agree to the shit.
Now she’d said yes. Her initial screening had started. Lawyers were involved.
It was time to stop saying over a hundred and put an actual number on paper. I looked down at the folder open on my desk.
Surrogacy was expensive as hell before you even paid the woman carrying the baby a dime.
Attorney, fertility treatment, medication, insurance, appointments and embryo transfers, then whatever came with the actual pregnancy. None of that bothered me. I didn’t like wasting money, there was a difference.
My grandfather hadn’t built shit for my father to grow it and pass it down to me just so I could be stupid with it.
In my family, having money didn’t mean throwing it at every problem, but this wasn’t every problem.
This was my wife and my child. And another woman agreeing to put her body through some shit neither one of us could fully understand just to give us something we’d been trying to have for years.
I closed the folder. One-fifty didn’t feel right. I’d already written it down, crossed it out and wrote two hundred. Staring at it for a while, I eventually crossed that shit out. I wasn’t trying to buy Nyrobi. That was exactly why putting a number on it felt strange.
What did you pay a woman to take medication that could fuck with her body? Like what did you pay her to wake up sick, gain weight, possibly miss work, go through labor, and then just leave the hospital while my wife and I went home with the baby she’d spent nine months carrying?
There wasn’t a number that made that shit equal.
A knock hit my office door before Kaizleigh pushed it open without waiting for me to answer.
I looked up.
She had one hand behind her back and that alone made me suspicios.
“What?”
She smiled.
“Why you always think I’m doing something?”
“I mean shit you usually are.”
She walked farther into the office.
I’d had the room redone when we first bought the house, but Kaizleigh had picked most of it. From the dark wood, the built-in shelves, leather chairs across from my desk. A bar against one wall that got used more by my father than me whenever he came over.
Kaizleigh walked straight past the chairs and dropped onto the sofa near the windows. The she brought hand from behind her back.
A baby catalog.
I stared at it and she stared back.
“No.”
“I didn’t say anything.”
“Hell, you didn’t have to.”
“I was just looking.”
“At what?”
“What stuff?”
“Baby stuff.”
“Kaizleigh.”
“Billion, I didn’t buy anything.”
“You had a crib sitting in an online cart three days ago.”
“I took it out.”
“After I caught you.”
“That is not the point.”
I shook my head.
This woman was going to have an entire nursery built before an embryo ever made it inside Nyrobi if I didn’t watch her.
“Come here.”
“I am here.”
“Bring your ass over here.”
She got up from the sofa and walked to my desk. I turned the folder toward her. Her eyes went to the numbers I’d scratched out.
“One-fifty?”
“Crossed it out.”
“I see that.”
“Then why you reading it babe?”
She ignored me.
“Two hundred?”
“Crossed that out too.”
Her eyes came up.
“So what are you thinking?”
“That’s what I wanted to talk to you about.”
She pulled out the chair across from me and sat.
I leaned back.
“You tell me.”
“Babeeee you I gotta go first?”
“Because she’s carrying your baby too.”
Kaizleigh looked down at the folder and the smile she walked in with disappeared.
“Damn, don’t say it like that.”
“Like what?”
“Carrying my baby.”
I frowned.
“What you want me to call it?”
“I don’t know.”
She rubbed her thumb across the edge of the catalog.
“I don’t know that just sound weird hearing it.”
“You having second thoughts?”
Her head came up fast.
“No.”
“Then what?”
“I want this.”
“I know.”
“Bad.”
“I know that too.”
She looked toward the windows.
“I just don’t think I really thought about what it was going to feel like once we actually got here.”
I waited.
“Like, I know it’s our embryo. I know it’ll be our baby. But she’s going to be the one pregnant.”
“Yeah.”
“She gets to feel everything.”
I watched her face.
“She’ll feel the first movement,” she added.
“Yeah.”
“The kicks.”
I nodded.
“All of it.”
I knew my wife so well and there it was the part she hadn’t been saying. I reached across the desk and took the catalog from her hand.
“You know you can tell me if this shit hurts.”
“I’m happy.”
“That aint what I said.”
Her eyes got glossy. I pointed at her.
“And don’t start that crying shit.”
She laughed and wiped under one eye.
“Shut up.”
“You’ve been crying every other day since Nyrobi said yes.”
“I have not.”
“You cried when they scheduled the screening.”
“I was emotional.”
“You cried after the screening.”
“I was happy.”
“You cried because she let them take blood.”
“I did not cry because of blood!”
I smiled.
“Sound stupid, don't it?”
“Fuck you.”
She laughed again, and that was what I wanted.
I hated seeing her get inside her own head.
I slid the folder closer to her.
“That's why I'm asking you.”
“About the money?”
“Yeah.”
She looked at the crossed-out numbers again.
“What do you think?”
“I asked you first.”
“Billion.”
“Kaizleigh.”
She rolled her eyes.
“One-fifty is a lot.”
“It is.”
“But...”
I waited.
She tapped the pen against the folder.
“It doesn't feel like enough.”
Exactly.
“Why?”
“You already know why.”
“I wanna hear what you're thinking.”
She leaned back.
“Because she's not just doing a job for us.”
“No.”
“And I know people get paid way less than that for surrogacy, but I don't care what other people pay.”
“Neither do I.”
“She has her own life. Her own job. Her mama depends on her. If something happens during the pregnancy, I don't want her worried about money on top of everything else.”
“That shit should be separate.”
“What?”
“Lost wages. Medical expenses. Anything pregnancy-related. That's not coming out of whatever we agree to pay her.”
Kaizleigh nodded immediately.
“Good.”
“So don't include that when you pick the number.”
She stared at the folder again.
“Two hundred?”
I didn't answer.
She looked at me.
“You don't like that either.”
“It's not that I don't like it.”
“Then what?”
I turned the pen between my fingers.
I thought about Nyrobi sitting in that clinic cracking jokes because she was scared of a needle.
Her asking what happened if she couldn't work.
What happened if something went wrong.
Whether she'd have her own lawyer.
Not once had she asked how much more she could get out of us.
She didn't even know what the real number was.
“Two-fifty.”
Kaizleigh's eyebrows went up.
“Two hundred and fifty thousand?”
“Yeah.”
She stared at me for a few seconds.
“That's a quarter million dollars.”
“I can count.”
“I'm serious.”
“So am I.”
“You think that's what we should give her?”
“I wouldn't have said it if I didn't.”
Kaizleigh looked back down at the folder. I could tell she was doing what I had already done. Trying to figure out if it was too much. Then probably feeling fucked up for even thinking about whether you could pay somebody too much to carry your child.
“The money won't hurt us,” I said.
“I know.”
“That don't mean we throw it away.”
“I know that too.”
“But I'm not negotiating this shit like we're buying another building.”
She looked at me.
“If she goes through with this, I don't want her walking away feeling like we got everything we wanted and she got the bare minimum we could talk her into taking.”
Kaizleigh got quiet.
Then she nodded.
“Two-fifty.”
“You sure?”
“Yes.”
“Don't agree because I said it.”
“I'm not.”
“Then tell me.”
She took the pen from my hand.
On the line underneath the two numbers I'd crossed out, she wrote:
$250,000
Then she circled it.
“There.”
I looked at her.
“That's your answer?”
“That's our answer.”
I nodded.
“Bet.”
She pushed the folder back toward me.
“And that's separate from everything else.”
“Absolutely.”
“Medical.”
“Separate.”
“Her attorney.”
“We pay it.”
“Medication.”
“Separate.”
“If she's put out of work.”
“Handled separately.”
“Travel to appointments.”
“Put it in the agreement.”
She paused.
“What about her mama?”
I frowned.
“What about her?”
“If something happens to Nyrobi.”
I knew exactly where her mind had gone.
“Don't.”
“No, Billion. I'm serious.”
“So am I.”
“She asked us that.”
“I remember.”
“What happens to Juanita if something happens to her daughter while she's pregnant with our baby?”
I sat back.
Neither one of us said anything for a few seconds.
I didn't like thinking about that shit.
Nobody did.
But not liking something didn't make it impossible.
“Life insurance,” I said.
Kaizleigh looked at me.
“We can do that?”
“We can ask the attorneys how to structure it.”
“I want that.”
“Then we'll do it.”
“And it doesn't come out of her two-fifty.”
“Kaizleigh.”
“What?”
“Nothing is coming out of her two-fifty.”
“Okay.”
“That's her money.”
She nodded.