Chapter 5 - THE SECOND ULTRASOUNDBrenda demanded a lawyer before explaining the gestational payments.
Mason remained in the penthouse library with a victim advocate, refusing to see his mother.
Emma sat across from Thomas in separate interview rooms connected by glass.
“What did Brenda do at Asterwell?”
Thomas looked exhausted.
“You are building a story from billing codes.”
“Then give me the real story.”
“It was a medical debt.”
“For gestational services?”
He looked away.
Emma’s fertility clinic confirmed that seven years earlier, an embryo-storage vendor accidentally released private records to Victor Hale’s office during a trust audit.
Those records included embryos created during Emma and Thomas’s early fertility treatment.
Emma believed the cycle had produced no viable embryos.
The new archive showed one embryo had been preserved.
Its status later changed to transferred by authorized spouse.
Emma stared at Thomas.
“You used an embryo without telling me.”
“We had both signed the original treatment consent.”
“The consent required both signatures for transfer.”
“Victor said my authorization was sufficient after your hospitalization.”
Emma remembered the emergency appendectomy six years earlier. Thomas sat beside her bed and brought dozens of insurance forms.
One may have contained a hidden reproductive authorization.
“To whom was it transferred?”
He remained silent.
Emma looked toward Brenda’s interview room.
“No.”
Thomas closed his eyes.
Brenda had not carried Emma’s embryo.
She had undergone medical screening as a potential gestational carrier but withdrew before transfer.
“Why?”
Brenda finally answered through her attorney.
“I thought Thomas and Emma would pay me.”
Emma felt physically ill.
“You were going to carry our child for money without telling me?”
“Thomas said you had emotionally abandoned the process.”
“I was recovering from surgery.”
“He said you never wanted children badly enough.”
Thomas struck the glass.
“Stop twisting this.”
Brenda laughed bitterly.
“You promised me two hundred thousand dollars and a house.”
The transfer was canceled after Brenda’s medical screening revealed a condition that increased pregnancy risk.
But the embryo did not return to storage.
Asterwell transferred it to another facility under Victor Hale’s authority.
Its final status was unknown.
Emma looked at the ultrasound on the table.
The child she carried now had been conceived naturally after years of believing pregnancy might never happen.
Somewhere, an earlier embryo may have been transferred, destroyed, or hidden.
Thomas insisted he did not know.
Amanda’s audit found payments from Brightwell to a private pediatric trust beginning five years earlier.
The beneficiary was identified only as E.L.
Monthly expenses included childcare, medical insurance, and preschool tuition.
Emma’s pulse accelerated.
“If a child was born, that child would be five.”
Amanda nodded.
Thomas’s face gave away the answer.
“You knew.”
“I knew Victor said the transfer succeeded.”
“Where is the child?”
“He never gave me a name.”
“You paid the trust.”
“Victor controlled the payments.”
“Through your company.”
“I was told the child had been placed with a confidential family.”
Emma stood so quickly that the chair fell.
“You allowed someone to take our child?”
Thomas shouted back.
“You had already left me emotionally! You treated fertility like a private tragedy I was not allowed to touch.”
“So you created a child behind my back?”
“I thought I would bring the child home once the trust was secure.”
“The trust.”
The word revealed the real motive.
A living child descended from Emma would activate inheritance protections. Thomas planned to reveal the child only when doing so benefited him.
The current pregnancy threatened that plan.
If Emma independently registered another child, Thomas could no longer present the hidden child as the only successor under his control.
Amanda opened another file.
The pediatric trust’s current address belonged to a residential building owned by Victor Hale.
Police reached it before noon.
The apartment was empty.
A child’s bedroom remained fully furnished.
On the wall hung drawings signed Ellie.
One drawing showed a woman with dark hair beside a tall building.
Beneath it, a child had written:
May you like
MY FIRST MOM DOESN’T KNOW ME.
👉 Emma’s stolen embryo may have become a five-year-old daughter, and someone had removed the child only hours before the penthouse dinner.
