CHAPTER ONE
PANIC. FEAR. BITTER REGRET.
Those were the things that Rosalie Brown felt as she looked down at her seven-months’-pregnant belly.
She took a deep breath. She’d thought she could do this—be a surrogate mother for a childless married couple. She’d convinced herself that at the end of her pregnancy she’d be able to joyfully give the baby into the arms of his true, loving family.
She’d been a fool.
Burning tears lifted to Rosalie’s eyes. Wrapping her hands over the wrinkled cotton of her sundress, she cradled her baby bump, her heart in her throat.
For the last seven months, as this baby had grown inside her, she’d felt him kick and move. She’d gone to ultrasounds and gotten in the habit of talking to him out loud as she took long walks along the edge of San Francisco Bay, morning and evening, rain and shine. As the winter fog rolled in, as the spring sunshine sparkled on the water, she’d come to love this baby.
Secretly.
Stupidly.
Rosalie blinked fast. When she’d seen the fertility clinic’s ad looking for surrogates, she’d been in a bad place, grief stricken, newly unemployed and unable to ever go home again. When she’d seen the ad, she’d thought it was a miracle: a way not just to help pay her rent for a few months, but to truly do something good in the world. The best way—the only way—to get past her own blinding guilt and pain.
So she’d met the prospective mother, a beautiful, chic Italian woman who’d had tears in her eyes as she spoke of her husband’s desire for a child. “Please,” the woman had whispered in huskily accented English, “you’re the only one who can help us.” For the first time in months, Rosalie had felt something other than despair. She’d signed the surrogacy contract that very day.
It was only a few weeks later, when she’d first started to surface from the fog of grief, that she’d had second thoughts. She’d realized she’d be giving up her own baby, not just carried by her body, but even related to her biologically. Yes, she would conceive the baby in a medical clinic, and she’d yet to meet the biological father, but would that make the child any less hers?
After just one artificial insemination attempt, Rosalie had realized it was a horrible mistake. She’d known she couldn’t be a surrogate after all. She’d decided to tell them to forget it.
But it was already too late.
She was pregnant. Pregnant on the first try. With a child that, by her own signed contract, she’d be forced to give away at birth.
For the last seven months, Rosalie had tried to convince herself the baby wasn’t really hers. She’d told herself the baby belonged to Chiara Falconeri and her husband, Alex. This was their baby. Not hers.
But every part of Rosalie—heart and body and soul—violently disagreed. Until finally, she could bear it no longer. Last week, she’d gotten a passport for the first time in her life. She’d booked an international flight.
And she’d flown here today, to Venice, in an act that could only be described as pure lunacy. For how would Rosalie ever convince the Italian couple to tear up the contract and let her keep her baby?
“Signora?”
She looked up at the smiling young Italian man in the striped shirt, holding his hand to help her out of the vaporetto, which had shuttled them across the lagoon from the Marco Polo airport. A hot gust of wind hit her yellow sundress, already wrinkled from being crammed into a middle seat in the airplane’s back row for a fourteen-hour flight. The small ferry rocked beneath her, or maybe she was just dizzy from stress and lack of sleep.
“Help with bag?” the young man asked politely.
“No,” she said, clinging to her small overnight bag on her shoulder. “Grazie.” It was the only word in Italian she knew, other than food words like spaghetti or gelato.
“Ciao, bella.” She felt the young man’s eyes follow her as she went up the gangplank, and she felt self-conscious of her hugely pregnant shape. She obviously wasn’t actually beautiful. Italian men must call every woman bella, she decided, as a mark of warmth and respect. She liked the country already.
At least she would, if she could just convince the Italian couple to let her keep her baby. How hard could that be?
Yeah, right. Rosalie had a hollow feeling in her chest as she followed the crowd of tourists off the vaporetto and into the city, past charming outdoor cafés and shops selling brightly colored glass and Venetian masks. For a moment, she looked up at the city—Venice, city of dreams, La Serenissima.
She’d grown up on a small Northern California farm, until she’d moved to nearby San Francisco for a job. She’d never imagined she might someday travel to the other side of the world. She was dazzled by the fairy-tale Renaissance buildings, the romantic Juliet balconies, the canals sparkling like diamonds beneath the hot Italian sun.