“I was saying you’re going to have to come over this summer.”
“To London?” I asked stupidly. Of course, to London. Where the hell else? I didn’t want to go to England for the summer. England barely got a summer. Summers in New York were hotter than the devil’s ballsack, but at least it didn’t rain every damn day.
“You’ll attend parties, socialize, network. If you take this seriously, you can end up with someone with a title.”
A title wasn’t anywhere on the list of things I wanted out of a partner. I didn’t care whether she was directly descended from the queen or if her family lived under a bridge. No, scratch that, I did care.
I just wanted her. I didn’t want a woman who was not her. I peered at the time on the phone. Almost four in the afternoon. My mother was probably going to keep this going all day if I didn’t stop her.
“Mother? Hey… hey mum? Mother!”
“What?” she said, finally stopping.
“I have a meeting in ten. I have to go.” I hung up before she could stop me. I was going to hear about that when we talked again but I couldn’t do it right now. I wasn’t getting married. I couldn’t look a woman in the eye and make a vow to her if I didn’t mean every word that I said. The most important thing was securing an heir. I had already talked to my legal team about what a surrogate delivery would mean when it came to inheritance and it seemed that the title and the child’s ability to inherit would not be affected.
Desperate times. If it was a baby they needed, I could get one.
I buzzed my driver and met him in front of the office.
“Where to, Mr. Hampton?” Barry asked.
“Nova Fertility,” I said. They were the most expensive clinic I could find in the city. The price wasn’t an obstacle, what I wanted was the discretion that came with that kind of price tag. They wouldn’t even tell me the kind of clientele that they had worked with but I could hazard a few guesses. They provided the whole range of fertility services. In vitro fertilization, intrauterine insemination, hormone therapy and of course, surrogacy.
I was the only single man in the waiting room, everyone else was coupled up. It looked like a boutique. The couches were plush and the décor was white and Tiffany blue. It looked nothing like a medical facility but maybe that was the point. With me were three more couples. A couple of the women smiled when our eyes met; the smile that said ‘I know what you’re going through’. I caught one of the men looking at me. He gave me a small nod like we were in the same boat. We weren’t though. He was here with a woman that he loved trying to have a child together. I was sorry that they seemed to be having difficulties but at least they had each other. I was about to fork over a large sum of money to a stranger to essentially rent her womb.
“Patient twenty-three?” That was me. This place was so exclusive they didn’t even call you by your name. I got up and followed the nurse to an office, just as beautiful as the waiting area we had just come from. A woman sat at the desk in a lab coat who looked more like a model than she did a medical practitioner. She invited me to sit.
“How are you Mr. Hampton?” she asked.
“Pretty good until I got here, to be honest,” I said. She made an exaggerated sad face.
“Surrogacy is unpopular and misunderstood but many people have built happy families through the help of a surrogate,” she said.
“So, what do I do? Do I have to pick a woman out of a catalog or what?”
“No, no. You tell us the traits of the person you are looking for and we will match them for you. I understand that you are looking for both an egg donation as well as gestational carrier services. That is something to consider while you are making your selection.”
“I don’t get to see pictures?”
“No. The women who offer their services have a right to their privacy as well. We use our discretion to match you once you have given us your specifications. All our women are screened for physical and mental health, including their family history of hereditary conditions so you don’t need to worry about that.”
Lucky me. This felt so weird. It felt like a weird kind of eugenics, just listing off the traits I wanted in the mother of my child and having that exact person delivered to me. There was only one person I could imagine having a child with.
“Dark hair. Almost black. Green eyes. Not too tall. Maybe around five feet and seven inches. Curvy woman, not skinny. Smart, obviously. Funny. Good sense of humor. Confident. Strong-willed. Loving.” I stopped because I wasn’t sure they screened for all those things. The woman looked up at me.
“Anything else?”
Yeah. If they could get me Brenna Andrews, the girl I fell in love with seven years ago, that was who I wanted to have a baby with.
“Kind and hardworking. I want her to be the kind of woman that I would want to raise a child with in real life. I don’t want this to just be a job for her.” The woman nodded, taking notes.
“Is that everything?” she asked
.
God, this was awful.
“Yes. That’s everything.”