Victoria demanded I take the baby back.
That was the first thing she said standing on my porch at almost midnight three weeks after the birth. Hair unwashed. Mascara smeared. My ex-husband’s truck idling behind her in the driveway.
I honestly thought something happened to the baby.
Instead she shoved a diaper bag at me and said, “I can’t do this anymore.”
The baby started crying immediately from the car seat sitting beside her feet. Victoria just covered her ears for a second like the sound physically hurt.
I asked where my ex-husband was.
That’s when she laughed in this exhausted, angry way and said he’d been sleeping at his office because apparently neither of them realized how hard an actual newborn would be. Feeding every two hours. No sleep. Medical bills. Her recovery complications after an emergency C-section.
Then she said something that changed the whole situation.
She admitted my ex-husband originally wanted me to stay involved after the birth because he thought the baby would “bond easier” if I helped the first few months. Victoria agreed while pregnant because she assumed motherhood would come naturally once the baby arrived.
It didn’t.
I brought the baby inside because standing on the porch arguing while a newborn screamed felt insane. Victoria sat at my kitchen table crying while I warmed a bottle automatically from muscle memory even though I kept telling myself this was not my child legally or emotionally.
Then she admitted the real reason she came.
Two days earlier she found messages between my ex-husband and his coworker discussing whether they “made a mistake” using me as the surrogate instead of adopting.
Apparently he wrote that watching me with the baby in the hospital “felt more like a real family than expected.”
Victoria left before sunrise without the diaper bag.
The next afternoon my ex-husband showed up panicking because she emptied their joint account and disappeared with the baby’s birth certificate, both passports, and twenty-eight thousand dollars from their fertility loan.