Chapter 16 - The Silent Accomplice
Before filing the catastrophic lawsuit, I needed to face Natalie. I drove to her house, demanding to hear the twisted truth from her own mouth. I found her in the bedroom, packing heavy suitcases, her six-month pregnant belly protruding. She already knew that I knew. Word travels fast in broken families.
She did not scream at me. She did not cry or beg for forgiveness. She looked at me while folding a sweater, with a dead, icy calmness that frightened me far more than yelling ever could have.
“If you sue me,” Natalie said, zipping a bag shut, “I’ll tell Oliver his crazy aunt wants to tear him away from his home. Who do you think a twelve-year-old boy will hate? You.”
And just before I turned to leave, she knocked the ground completely out from under me with one chilling sentence. “You still don’t know everything that happened that night at the clinic, Lauren. Go ask Mom.”
That same night, I stormed back into my mother’s house. I slammed the laboratory report onto the coffee table. “Mom. What exactly happened that night? Tell me the truth, or I swear you will never see me again.”
She stayed silent for a long time, staring at the floor. Then she sat down heavily, as if the bones in her legs had turned to dust.
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Natalie could not have children; her uterus was severely scarred. I had always known that. What I did not know was that weeks before I gave birth, Natalie’s surrogate had suffered a late-term miscarriage. No one had told me because I was deployed, newly widowed, and highly stressed.
Natalie was utterly destroyed, refusing to eat or speak for weeks.
