Chapter 2

"Who is this friend?"

I was clutching the ultrasound sheet so hard my nails almost ripped through the paper.

Ethan looked at me. There was no guilt in his eyes. Only calculation. He was measuring my anger, deciding how much truth he needed to feed me to keep me quiet.

"You're too emotional right now, Chloe. Let's talk tomorrow—"

"I asked you a question."

After a few seconds of silence, he picked up his glass of water, his Adam's apple bobbing.

"Adrian Vance."

Adrian Vance.

The real estate mogul. He was on the Forbes list every single year. His wife was Victoria Vance, a mega-influencer with over twenty million followers on Instagram. Her brand was built on being "the ultimate, most elegant mom-to-be."

Wait.

Victoria.

"Three years ago... she was the one who set us up at that dinner party, wasn't she?"

He didn't deny it. At that dinner, Victoria had smiled warmly, pushing me toward Ethan, saying, *“You two are a match made in heaven.”*

"What is your relationship with her?"

"We went to college together."

We had been married for three years, and he had never mentioned her once.

I pushed myself up from the sofa and walked into the study. His laptop was closed but still running. On the desktop, there was a folder named *“The Project.”* He hadn't even locked it with a password. He probably thought I was too stupid to do anything about it.

The first file was my gynecological report. My name, ID, uterine position, endometrial thickness, ovarian reserve—every detail was annotated with handwritten notes.

The creation date of the file was two months before we even met.

The second file was an Excel spreadsheet.

The title: *Candidate Evaluation Matrix.*

Fourteen rows. Fourteen women. Age, height, weight, menstrual cycle, history of pregnancy. The last column was labeled: *Overall Score.*

I was in row three. Score: 9.2. The highest on the sheet.

Ethan leaned against the doorframe, watching me. His expression was like an adult watching a toddler open a toy.

"You made a product catalog of women?"

"It’s a screening sheet for the surrogate carrier," he corrected me, his tone clinical. "Victoria has a uterine defect. She needed a carrier with the absolute best physical indicators. Standard agency surrogacy is too public and carries too many legal risks. I proposed a more secure option."

"By marrying me."

"Yes. Doing IVF under the guise of marriage is completely legal. No loopholes."

He smiled slightly as he said those words, as if he were presenting a beautiful business model.

"So, where did I rank on this list?"

"First."

"Oh. And the prize for first place was getting to marry you?"

"You could look at it that way."

My nails dug deep into the leather of his office chair. My entire arm was shaking.

"I’m terminating the pregnancy tomorrow."

Suddenly, his hand clamped down on my wrist like a steel cuff. In three years of marriage, he had never laid a finger on me. He had never needed violence; his psychological control was always enough. But now, he was panicking.

"You can hate me, but you cannot touch this child. Victoria has waited five years. The first three attempts failed—"

He stopped mid-sentence.

"The first three?"

Three times on the operating table. Three times bleeding. Three times staring at a single line on a pregnancy test. Every time, I thought it was my fault, that my body was broken. Every time, he had held me and said, *“It’s okay, honey. We’ll try again.”*

"Were those first three times accidents, or was that planned too?"

He let go of my wrist. Not out of mercy, but because he realized he had said too much.

"Chloe, calm down."

"Answer me!"

He took a step back, slipping into his corporate-presentation voice. "The embryo batches for the first three runs didn't meet the standards. It was Victoria’s call. She only wanted the premium-grade embryos."

Quality control. She called my pain *quality control*.

The agony of those three procedures, kneeling over the toilet vomiting until my stomach spasmed, the heartbreaking look on his face when I came out of the clinic—it was all an act. He was just helping her run a quality-assurance check on my body.

"Let me remind you of one last thing," his voice was quiet, but every word felt like a nail driving into my chest. "Your mother is living very comfortably at Meadowview. The $8,500 monthly care fee—did you really think I was paying that out of my own pocket?"