Chapter 3 - Secrets of the Neonatal Ward
The digital clock on the mahogany wall read 2:14 AM.
The sprawling Maro estate in the Garden District of New Orleans was surrounded by three-meter brick walls and guarded by twenty-four-hour private security patrols, but inside the study, the only sound was the rhythmic ticking of a grandfather clock and the faint, muffled hum of the nursery monitors next door.
Antoine hadn't dismissed me. Instead, he had ordered Donovan to bring up the full digital archives of St. Jude’s hospital server—a feat of corporate hacking that Donovan accomplished in under twenty minutes using an encrypted satellite link.
“There’s more, Boss,” Donovan said, tapping the screen of his ruggedized tactical laptop. “We decrypted the hidden partition on the hospital’s master database. The alteration wasn't just about an administrator login. Someone injected a fraudulent birth surrogate registry entry into the system.”
I sat stiffly in the velvet armchair, a steaming cup of chamomile tea cooling untouched on the side table. “A surrogate registry? What does that have to do with me?”
Antoine leaned over the laptop, his eyes narrowing as he read the scrolling lines of encrypted code. “Look at the genetic marker cross-reference. St. Jude’s didn't just log the triplets as premature births from my late wife, Clara. The system lists a secondary biological profile match for egg donation storage dating back eighteen months.”
My breath caught in my throat. Eighteen months ago, during a period of desperate financial distress when I was working three different cash-in-hand jobs to pay for my mother’s medical treatments, I had responded to a confidential clinical research flyer offering compensation for biological tissue preservation at a private medical clinic downtown—a clinic that was later bought out by the St. Jude network.
“I... I signed up for a clinical tissue study,” I whispered, the memory suddenly flooding back with terrifying clarity. “They told me it was for genetic cancer research. They paid me two thousand dollars cash, took a tissue sample, and made me sign a non-disclosure agreement. I never thought... I never imagined—”
“You didn't just donate tissue, Dela,” Antoine interrupted, his voice tight and breathless as he pulled up a scanned PDF of the original legal contract. At the bottom of the page was my signature, notarized by a legal firm owned entirely by the Dufor family trust. “You were used as an anonymous gestational surrogate vector for a private fertility program funded secretly by my late wife’s family.”
The room spun. The furniture, the amber lamps, the towering bookshelves dissolved into a dizzying blur.
Clara Dufor—Antoine’s aristocratic, fiercely proud late wife—had suffered from a severe medical condition that prevented her from carrying a natural pregnancy. Desperate for an heir to secure the Maro shipping empire without letting outsiders know of her medical vulnerability, the Dufor family had covertly utilized an independent fertility clinic to implant embryos harvested from Clara and Antoine into a compatible, anonymous host body.
That host body had been me.
“They stole it,” I whispered, tears spilling over my lashes as the horrifying truth locked into place. “When I went in for my routine follow-up checkup six months into the pregnancy, the clinic was completely empty. The doctors told me the project had lost funding and been terminated. They gave me a severance check, told me I had suffered a spontaneous early miscarriage due to stress, and made me sign papers promising never to inquire about the clinic again.”
Antoine stared at me, his face draining of all color. The cold, ruthless shipping boss vanished, replaced by a man whose entire reality had just been violently upended.
“Clara told me she carried our children to term,” Antoine said, his voice cracking slightly for the first time. “She told me she went into early labor on that stormy night because of the stress of an attempted corporate ambush on our docks. Her car crashed into the bayou. The police report ruled it an accidental drowning.”
“It wasn't an accident,” a sharp, cold voice echoed from the doorway.
Antoine and Donovan whipped around simultaneously.
May you like
Standing in the doorway of the study, holding a heavy silver candlestick like a weapon, was Mrs. Dufor—Antoine’s formidable, aristocratic mother-in-law, who had supposedly been asleep in the East Wing guest suite. Her eyes burned with pure, unadulterated venom as she looked from Antoine to me.
“You fool, Antoine,” Mrs. Dufor spat, her hands trembling with rage. “You brought the very ghost who ruined my daughter’s life right into your own home.”
