Page 41 of Doctor Daddies

I haven’t told any of the guys that I’m coming down here. In fact, I haven’t spoken to them at all since I asked them to leave my apartment after Matt stormed out. I just couldn’t stand to have them there, no matter how much their presence might have comforted me, knowing that it was that very thing that had caused all this in the first place.

I can’t stop turning it over in my head, wondering how much better off I would have been if I had just told them to go home after we had fooled around the night before. But, when I was cuddling with the three of them on the couch, I know there’s not a damn thing I could have done to convince myself that it was a bad idea to ask them to stay. No, with them so close to me, it was like every bit of good sense just faded away, and now I have to handle the consequences.

Not that I could have known my brother was going to turn up so early from his conference, or that he would let himself into the apartment with no warning and walk right into my bedroom to wake me up like he did when we were kids and I was late for school.

I keep finding ways to turn this into his mistake, but that’s not fair. He could never have guessed that I was doing something like that, and it’s my job to try and paper over the cracks and fix what remains of our relationship.

I force myself to my feet, and, on shaky legs, make my way to his apartment building. I hover my finger over the buzzer to his place, but mercifully, one of his neighbors steps out at the exact moment I arrive. I slip in behind her, glad that I’m not going to have to announce my arrival to my brother before I’m ready, because I get the feeling that he would just tell me to fuck right off if he knew I was here.

I make it to his door, and knock before I can stop myself, shifting my weight from foot to foot as I wait for him to answer. Is he even in? I think about fleeing before I can answer that question, giving myself a break from the stress and guilt of everything that has been going on, but before I can, the door opens before me, and I find myself face-to-face with my brother.

His eyes narrow the second he sees me, and I have to put my foot in the door to keep him from slamming it shut right in my face.

“Matt, please, I need to talk to you?—”

“I’ve said everything I need to say,” he replies, voice hollow, blunt.

My heart drops, hearing him like that, how empty and angry he sounds. He shouldn’t be dealing with all of this emotion alone, but who can he turn to, when the people closest to him are the very ones who hurt him?

“Yeah, but I haven’t,” I protest. “You really going to turn a pregnant lady away from your door?”

He pauses for a moment, eyeing me—and I can tell that has gotten under his skin. He might hate my guts right now, but he knows it’s not fair on the kids I’m carrying to leave me with this level of stress to deal with.

Finally, and with a heavy, pointed sigh, he steps aside, jerking his head to indicate that I can come in. “Fine.”

I step inside before he can think better of it, standing there awkwardly in the corridor and trying to remember everything I had planned to say before I got here. I ran through a speech in my head, all the right ways to tell him about everything that had happened, but now that I’m here, under the intensity of his glare once again, it’s like all of it has just vanished from my mind.

“I, uh, can I have a glass of water?” I ask him. Something to fill the space between us, anything, I don’t care right now.

For a second, he just stands there in the doorway to the kitchen, but then he does as I ask, pouring me a glass and pressing it into my hands. I take a long sip, focusing on the cool sensationwashing across my tongue, and finally ground myself enough to actually come out with something close to what I wanted to say to him.

“I…I know you’re mad at me, Matthew,” I murmur, and he snorts.

“Mad at you? I’m fucking furious,” he retorts. “And at the three of them too. You fuckers went behind my back to—” He stops himself before he can get too worked up, closing his eyes and lifting a hand. “You know what, I’ve said everything I need to say. I don’t want to hear it. Not from you, not from them. You should go.”

“I’m not leaving until you talk to me, Matt.”

He locks eyes with me for a moment, and I guess he must remember exactly who he’s dealing with right now. As much as he might like to think that he, as the big brother, is the one with the power in what remains of our family, I’m stubborn enough to dig my heels in and make it so that he has no choice but to hear what I’m telling him.

And there’s a hint of curiosity in his gaze too. Like there is something he wants to know, despite himself—something he can’t deny the urge to find out. That’s my brother, through and through; he always wants to get to the bottom of things, even if what’s waiting there for him at the other side might hurt him.

“Why did you do it, Millie?” he asks me softly, finally breaking the silence between us. “Agree to that surrogacy contract, without telling me?”

“Because I knew you would try to stop me.”

“And you didn’t think there might have been a good reason for it?” he points out.

I shake my head. “I know how it sounds,” I reply. “But you have to understand, Matt, just how difficult it’s been for me, taking care of Lewis all by myself.”

He parts his lips, and I lift my hand to stop him.

“You’ve done so much to help me, and I appreciate it so much,” I assure him. “I know you’ve done everything you can to make life easier for the two of us, and Lewis and I both love you for it. But we need money, Matt. Money. The kind of money that the three of them were offering for someone to carry their children, it wasn’t the sort of thing I could just walk away from. And besides…” I pause for a moment, taking a deep breath, the words coming so quickly now that it’s almost as though I’m reciting lines.

“You should have seen them when they came to me to ask for help,” I murmur, lowering my gaze slightly. “They want to be fathers so badly, they really do. And you have to admit, they’re in a great place to be dads. I wasn’t going to go through with it, not when I first found out that it was the three of them asking me for that kind of help, but when they told me how much this meant to them, there was just no way that I could say no.”

“But why would they even think of you for something like this?” he demands. “That’s the part I don’t get. They run a fucking fertility clinic, for God’s sake, if they had wanted someone to do this for them, they could have found someone who was…”

“Because…because…”