I didn’t realize I was selling my body until the check cleared. And even then, I told myself it was love. Because that’s how deep the lie ran.
My husband, Ethan, didn’t hold a gun to my head. He just held my hand while I signed the surrogacy papers; he just told me that we were doing it for us. For our son.
A pensive woman sitting on a couch | Source: Midjourney
But I didn’t know that we were doing it for his mother, drowning in debt she created.
By the time I realized I’d been used, I’d carried two babies that weren’t mine and lost everything that was.
Including him.
When Ethan and I got married, people said that we had it all figured out. We met in college — me finishing my nursing degree and him starting his MBA. By our mid-30s, we had a bright five-year-old son named Jacob, a small apartment, and a marriage that looked strong from the outside.