Accidental Triplets with the Billionaire novel · Chapter 1 of 24
Chapter 1: The Third Heartbeat
Letty's eight-week scan shows three heartbeats, and the clinic director offers her $200,000 to end it tonight; she refuses and walks out into the lobby, where the embryos' real father waits.
The sonographer moved the wand, and I laughed out loud.
There was one heartbeat on the screen, fast as a hummingbird.
Then she slid the wand a half inch and there was another.
Then a third, tucked behind the first two.
"Three?" I said. "It's supposed to be one."
The sonographer didn't answer.
She stared at the screen with her mouth slightly open.
I'm a nursing assistant. I've watched a hundred doctors go still right before they say a bad word.
"I'll get Dr. Sayre," she said.
She left the room without looking at me.
I lay there with cold gel on my stomach and counted the heartbeats again.
Still three.
I was eight weeks along, carrying a baby for a couple I had met twice.
They were kind, nervous people with a nursery already painted.
Ingrid Sayre came in fast, closed the door, and turned the screen to the wall.
She is the director of the Halden Family Fertility clinic, and in all my visits I had never seen her hair out of place.
Today one dark strand had come loose.
"Letty, would you come to my office, please?" she said. "Just you."
I wiped my stomach with a paper towel and followed her down the hall.
Her office had a long window and a glass desk with nothing on it.
She did not sit down.
"There was an error on transfer day," she said. "The embryos placed in you were not the couple's."
My hands went cold.
"Whose are they?"
"They belong to another client. I can't say more until I've spoken to him."
"And there are three."
"Yes."
I sat down because my knees told me to.
I thought of my mother's kitchen table, covered in bills with red stamps.
I thought of the ninety thousand dollars I had signed for, to save her house.
Ingrid opened a drawer and laid a check on the glass.
It was made out to me.
The amount was two hundred thousand dollars.
"The clinic accepts full responsibility," she said. "We can end the pregnancy tonight, here, privately. You keep the check and the original fee, and no one ever hears about this."
I looked at the number for a long moment.
I'm not going to lie. It was more money than anyone in my family had ever seen.
Then the third heartbeat flickered in my head, small and stubborn.
"Tonight," I said.
"I have a physician standing by."
"You mean the babies you just put inside me by mistake."
"Letty, this is the kindest option for everyone."
"Everyone but them."
I pushed the check back across the glass with one finger.
"No."
She didn't blink. "Please take a minute and think about your mother's house."
My head snapped up.
I had never told her about my mother's house.
"It's in your file," Ingrid said quietly. "Please. Think."
I stood.
"I did think," I said. "Give me my file, and tell the man whose they are that I'll be in the lobby."
She held out the folder without a word.
I took it and went to the door.
At the door I looked back, and I did not understand what I saw.
Ingrid Sayre had her eyes shut and one hand flat on her chest.
Her shoulders dropped as she breathed out slowly.
Then she saw me watching and went back to being a director.
I walked down the hall with my file against my chest and my hand on my stomach.
A woman at the front desk stared at me and quickly looked away.
I was almost to the revolving door when it turned.
Two men in dark suits came in, carrying thin leather cases.
A third man walked between them.
He was tall, maybe thirty-five, with dark hair and gray eyes so tired they looked bruised.
His coat probably cost more than my car.
He stopped when he saw me.
He looked at my face, then at my hand on my stomach, and something moved across his expression that I couldn't name.
"Ms. Penhale?" he said.
"Who are you?"
"Nathan Corwin."
His voice was low and perfectly steady, and his hands were not.
"Those are my embryos," he said. "They are the last three my wife and I ever made."
He swallowed once.
"She died two years ago."
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