“Sure… but not biologically. Right?”
His jaw flexed.
“Please… Sue…”
“I couldn’t give you a baby, Sue. I tried so many times. And I failed. I was the reason we couldn’t do it.”
“So what, Greg? You borrowed Mike’s… genes without asking me?”
He didn’t answer.
“Did you forge my signature at the clinic?”
He stared at the floor. I tapped the screen once, right on ‘0% DNA Shared.’
He didn’t answer.
He finally spoke. “I didn’t have a choice.”
“You always had a choice,” I said. “You just didn’t like the ones that required honesty.”
**
I drove to Mike and Lindsay’s the next morning. She answered the door in gray leggings, coffee in hand.
“Sue? You look like you haven’t slept. What’s going on?”
“I need to talk to Mike. Now.”
Something in my face must have told her this wasn’t casual. She stepped aside.
“What’s going on?”
Mike came down the hallway. He stopped when he saw me.
“You knew? All this time?! You knew the truth about my daughter?”
He ran a hand over his face. “Sue…”
“Answer me.”
“I knew.”
Lindsay’s head snapped toward him. “You knew what?”
“You knew the truth about my daughter?”
Mike looked at me, not her.
“Greg was falling apart. He felt useless. He said you wanted a baby more than anything, and he couldn’t give you one. He asked for help.”
“Help? You call this… help?”
“We had an agreement,” Mike said quickly. “A gentleman’s agreement. No one would ever know. I wouldn’t be involved. It would just be… biology. He’d be the dad in every way that mattered.”
Lindsay stared at him like he had started speaking another language.
“You call this… help?”
“A gentleman’s agreement? About another woman’s body?” she gasped.
Mike’s voice cracked. “I thought I was saving your marriage. I thought I was… giving you a gift.”
Silence pressed in.
“You both decided,” Lindsay said quietly, “that we didn’t deserve the truth.”
Lindsay’s phone buzzed. Greg’s name flashed. She turned the screen toward us, answered, then put it on speaker.
“Don’t call my house again,” she said, voice flat, and ended it.
“A gentleman’s agreement?”
