Chapter 1 #2
"I—yeah, okay." I pressed my lips together behind my mask. "And if you don't—"
"The land goes to auction. Pending a county review that could take another six to twelve months, during which my uncle's claim sits alongside mine and the whole thing becomes—" He paused. "There are developers. They've been waiting for exactly this kind of opening."
"How much land?"
"Twenty-four hundred acres."
I did the math on that involuntarily, the way I did with everything.
Twenty-four hundred acres of Hill Country, an hour north of San Antonio, with developers circling.
I thought about the numbers I'd been staring at for forty minutes and felt the specific vertigo of two different scales of problem existing in the same room.
"And you've been running it," I said. "The ranch."
"Twelve years."
"So the stewardship part—"
"Favors me. But it's not sufficient on its own. The heir clause is separate." He looked at the sunflower print. "Hence…"
"Hence," I agreed.
We sat with that for a moment.
I was doing something I shouldn't have been doing, which was running a completely different set of numbers.
Not the ones on my spreadsheet. A new set.
The kind that started with he needs and I need and arrived, with the uncomfortable efficiency of a well-built formula, at a conclusion I had absolutely not come here to reach today.
Stop it, I told my brain.
My brain did not stop it.
"So you're here looking at—what, surrogacy options?" I asked.
Casual. Very casual. A normal question.
"Among other things." He exhaled slowly. "The clinic came recommended. I thought I'd—explore what was available. Legally. Before I made any decisions."
"Right." I nodded. "That makes sense."
Stop it.
"What's your plan B?" he asked. "If the numbers don't work out."
"Move back in with my parents." I said it lightly, like it wasn't a small death. "My mom would actually love it. She'd make me go to mass."
"You're not a mass person?"
"I'm a lapsed mass person. There's a difference." I paused. "She lights candles for me. A lot of candles. I think at this point I have a whole vigil going on my behalf at Saint Anthony's."
His eyes crinkled again—a smile I was dying to see without the mask. "What are the candles for?"
I gestured vaguely at the waiting room. At the spreadsheet. At the entire situation.
"This," I said. "The plan. She's very—she believes in doing things in the right order. Marriage, then baby." I shrugged. "I'm trying to negotiate a shortcut."
"She know you're here?"
"She knows I had an appointment. She doesn't know what for." I folded the spreadsheet one more time, a habit now, something to do with my hands. "She'd light more candles."
He was quiet for a moment. Then: "My mother would probably do the same."
I looked at him sideways. "She know you're here?"
"She knows I have a problem." The corner of his eye creased. "She's chosen to have faith that I'll solve it."
Something about the way he said it—not self-pitying, not funny exactly, just honest—hit me somewhere undefended.
He needs a woman who wants a baby, said the part of my brain I had been telling to stop it.
I need a man who—
"Okay," I said, out loud, before I'd made the decision to speak.
He looked at me.
My face was on fire behind the marigold mask.
"I'm sorry," I said. "I just—I was doing math."
"Math."
"In my head. The whole time you were talking.
" I looked down at the spreadsheet. Then back at him.
His eyes were very steady and very brown and not helping.
"You need someone to have your baby. And I—" I gestured at myself.
At the spreadsheet. At the general disaster of my current situation.
"I mean. It makes sense, right? Logistically.
You need a surrogate and I need a donor and we're both already—" I waved at the waiting room. "Here."
Silence.
The sunflower print stared at us.
I became very interested in my own lap.
"I'm sorry," I rushed out. "That was insane. Forget I said—"
"Walk me through your numbers."
I looked up.
He hadn't moved. Same posture, same stillness, those big hands loose on his knees. He was watching me with an expression I couldn't fully read above the mask but it wasn't horrified and it wasn't amused and it wasn't the careful blankness of a man trying to figure out how to let someone down easy.
It was the expression of a man pricing something.
"My numbers," I said.
"The spreadsheet." He nodded at it. "Walk me through it."
I stared at him for one more second. Then I unfolded the spreadsheet.
"Okay," I said. "So. Current savings are here—"
I pointed. He leaned in slightly to see, close enough that I could smell cedar and something warm underneath it, and my dormant body staged another small revolt that I dealt with by talking faster.
I walked him through all of it. Savings.
Consultation fees. The cost of a sperm donor, which I had researched with the thoroughness of a woman who had spent three weeks trying not to think about how much it cost. The cost of the procedure itself, one attempt, two, three, the diminishing probability curve I'd built into the model because I was an optimist but not a delusional one.
The cost of my apartment minus what I could get back from breaking the lease. The timeline. The gap.
He listened. Actually listened, the way I'd said—not waiting for his turn to talk, following the numbers, asking one question about the lease terms that was clarifying and not stupid.
When I finished he was quiet for a moment.
Then he said: "I've got a cottage on the property. No rent."
I stopped breathing.
"It's small," he said. "One bedroom. There's a kitchen. You'd have a truck to use, unless you have a car." A brief pause. "Fair warning—it's in the middle of the goat pasture."
I blinked. "The goat pasture."
"My mother keeps pygmy goats. Seven of them. They have the run of that section of the property most of the time." He said it the way you'd mention a minor weather pattern. A fact, not an apology. "They're friendly. Mostly."
"Mostly," I repeated.
"Dolly can be territorial about the porch."
I stared at him.
He looked at the sunflower print.
"The town's about a mile from the ranch," he continued, as if he hadn't just told me I'd be living in a goat kingdom. "There's a diner."
"A diner," I repeated.
"And a bar. Feed store. Hardware store." His eyes crinkled slightly. "It's not San Antonio."
"I grew up near San Antonio," I said faintly. "I know what Hill Country towns are like."
"Then you know what you'd be getting into."
I looked at this man. This enormous, still, silver-templed stranger in a fertility clinic waiting room who had just offered me a cottage on his ranch in exchange for having his baby, as casually as you'd offer someone a ride.
"We'd need a contract," I said.
"Obviously."
"A real one. Parental rights, financial arrangements, what happens if—" I stopped. "There are a lot of variables."
"I have a lawyer."
"I'd want my own lawyer to review it."
"That's reasonable."
I looked back down at the spreadsheet. At the numbers that had been saying no for forty minutes.
The numbers were saying something different now.
"I don't even know your name," I said.
"Gage," he said. "Gage Holt."
He held out his hand. Big and weathered and very steady.
I looked at it for one second. Then I took it.
"Millie Calloway," I said.
His hand was warm and completely certain around mine and my body had many feelings about this that I was filing away to deal with never.
"So," Gage Holt said, in that unhurried Texas voice. "You want to talk terms?"
From across the waiting room, a nurse appeared in the doorway with a clipboard.
"Calloway?" she called. "We're ready for you."
I looked at Gage. He looked at me.
"After," I said.
He nodded once. Settled back in his chair.
"I'll be here," he said.