Page 40 of Doctor Daddies

There it is. The secret’s out.

Matt stands there for a second, like he hasn’t heard her at all, and I wonder what the fuck is going through his mind. Shock rushes through his eyes, and he looks between us, almost like he thinks this could be a kind of joke and we will bust out laughing and tell him that we got him good.

“What the hell are you…?”

“We were looking for someone who would be able to carry our children, someone who’d be willing to be implanted with our embryos,” Ross explains, cutting in quickly before Matt’s mind can spin out any further than it already has. “And we already knew your sister, knew the kind of person she was through you, and?—”

“And you decided that you were going to get her fucking pregnant?” Matt finishes up. “Is that why you’re here, you’re trying to knock her up? Because if you think for a second that I’m going to let you?—”

“Matt, I’m already pregnant.”

Millie whispers the words before he can spin out any further, and he turns to her, his eyes wide.

“You’re…you’re pregnant?”

His gaze flicks down to her belly, like he can’t make sense of it, like he can’t even begin to understand what she has just said to him. As straightforward as her words are, I can tell that he can’t wrap his head around it. Looking at her now, you would never guess that she was with child, let alone multiples, but I know it’s true.

“They came to me with a contract,” she explains to him swiftly, the words tumbling hurriedly out of her mouth like she feels the need to justify herself. “And I—you know how much I’ve been struggling to keep up with Lewis and everything he needs, and the money was good, and I—I knew they would be good fathers, so I wanted to help them have a family, and?—”

“And you decided you would get fucking pregnant by my best friends without telling me a thing about it?” Matt asks, his voice breaking as it rises furiously. “And you guys—you’ve just been waiting for a chance to get your hands on my sister? Make her pregnant so you could have her all to yourselves…?”

“That’s not what this was about at all,” I protest, stepping forward to try and block him from berating Millie so directly. “We knew it would be difficult to find someone who could handle something like this, and we wanted someone we knew we could trust. Someone…”

“Someone who had the kind of family who would understand why she would do something like this,” James adds, trying to appeal to the sense of friendship that still exists between us. I’m not sure if there’s any point even mentioning it right now, given that it seems to have been burned to ashes by this revelation.

“You didn’t give me a chance to understand,” Matt shoots back. “Because you knew that if you had come to me with any of this, I would have shut this shit down. You don’t get to use my sister like a fucking incubator?—”

“Matt, that’s not what’s happening here!” Millie exclaims defensively. “I made a choice, I came to a decision on my own terms, and I’m not going to let you talk about me like a?—”

“I don’t want to talk to you,” he replies, lifting his hand and stopping her dead in her tracks. “Jesus, I don’t want to even look at you right now, Millie.” He glances around the room, as though reminding himself that she’s not the only one who did this.

“I don’t want to talk to any of you,” he mutters, shaking his head. “Don’t…don’t reach out. Don’t message me. Don’t call…”

He turns on his heel and makes for the door, and Millie moves to run after him—but I catch her hand before she can, not wanting her to put herself through anything more than she already has. God knows that her brother isn’t going to listen to anything she has to say right now, and truthfully, I don’t think I can blame him. He just walked in on the three of us with his sister, in bed with her, and now he’s finding out that she’s pregnant with our children too. It’s a double blow, a right hook followed by a damn gunshot, and he needs time to process it if he has any hope of making sense of it.

Or if we stand a goddamn chance of preserving what remains of our relationship with him.

The front door slams, and silence falls around the room as we all just stand there, clearly too stunned to do anything other than let the quiet consume us.

Because, right now, I don’t know if there’s anything we can do to fix what has just gone down.

19

MILLIE

I siton the bench outside my brother’s apartment building, staring up at the window I know belongs to him, trying to muster what courage I can to go up and talk to him. Whatever it is that’s going through his mind, it can’t be worse than what has been tormenting my thoughts since the moment he walked out of my apartment yesterday. And I will do just about anything in my power to put right what was torn apart when he saw us like that.

Ugh.Even the thought of it is enough to make me want to vanish into myself.

The look on his face when he saw us all together, it’s burned onto my brain whether I like it or not, the expression he hit us with when he realized that I was sprawled out in bed with all three of his best friends. In that instant, whatever fantasy land I had been living in, thinking that he might be able to accept all of this, that he might see that there was something good to be found in this, vanished, and I found myself faced with the harsh, brutal truth.

He hasn’t been answering any of my calls, which shouldn’t come as any kind of surprise. He told us not to get in touch with him,but there’s no way I can just leave all of that untouched. He’s my brother, for God’s sake, my last living family aside from Lewis, and I refuse to let something like this tear apart our relationship. It might not be easy to get him to see it from my point of view, but once he’s had a little time to cool off, if I just explain it all to him, he will understand.

Lewis is at school, completely oblivious to everything that’s going on. He hummed away to himself in the car this morning as he looked out the window, his mood brighter than it has been in a long time. I should have been happy, seeing him so energetic, but all I could think about was how I would break the news to him that his beloved uncle might never want to set foot in our home again after what he’s discovered about me.

I feel a pinch of tears at the back of my eyes, and I blink, trying to pull myself together. I don’t want to go there in tears, all emotional, making it seem like I’m trying to manipulate Matt into feeling sorry for me when that’s anything but my intent.

I’m the one who should be feeling sorry. I can’t even imagine how much of a headfuck it has been for him to find all this out. And he doesn’t even know the half of it. Not yet, anyway. I don’t know if he will be able to handle it when he does, but the only way out is through, and I want to share everything he needs to know.