Chapter 8 - THE WRONG VILLAIN
Megan Blake agreed to meet only after her attorney confirmed the Evergreen transfer had failed and she was not currently pregnant. She and Stephen lived in Greenwich, and we met in a neutral law office because nobody trusted anyone else enough for a family living room.
Megan looked humiliated before we asked a question.
She had believed B-19 was an anonymous embryo.
Not ours.
Stephen told her the donor couple had completed their family and wanted the embryo placed with relatives rather than discarded. Because Megan had experienced four miscarriages, she accepted.
“Relatives?” I asked.
She looked at Stephen.
He closed his eyes.
That was the moment the midpoint reversal began.
Stephen knew the embryo came from Daniel and me.
He had known before the transfer.
Daniel stood so fast his chair moved backward. “What the hell were you doing?”
Stephen said he was trying to protect his family.
Not build it.
Protect it.
Seven months earlier, he discovered Margaret had hidden Richard’s amended estate plan from several Bennett beneficiaries. Under the new structure, Daniel had broad control over future voting shares. Stephen feared Margaret would eventually persuade Daniel to lock his branch out permanently.
Then Margaret approached him.
Not Vanessa.
Not a clinic employee.
Margaret.
She offered B-19.
Her proposal was almost incomprehensible in its logic: if Stephen’s household raised a biological child from Daniel’s embryo, the next generation would connect both branches of the family and reduce future succession conflict.
“She said Amy had agreed?” I asked.
Stephen looked ashamed. “She said you were done with IVF and didn’t want involvement.”
The same lie she told Vanessa.
Margaret had offered one embryo to the woman emotionally entangled with Daniel and another to the rival family branch.
She was not trying to produce one heir.
She was engineering a network of biological children she believed would bind the Bennett family together after she was gone.
The original villain changed shape.
Margaret’s goal was not inheritance.
It was control through kinship.
Then Vanessa entered the story differently.
Stephen told us she discovered the B-19 transfer because Margaret accidentally forwarded her an Evergreen invoice. Vanessa realized I almost certainly had not consented because Margaret had already admitted forging paperwork for her own pregnancy.
That was when Vanessa contacted Victoria Reed.
She had been trying to stop the second transfer.
“Why didn’t she tell me?” I asked.
Stephen answered softly. “Because then she would have had to tell you about herself.”
That was it.
Vanessa was both victim and accomplice.
She knew Margaret had violated my consent.
She tried to stop Margaret from doing it again.
But she kept her own pregnancy secret because exposing the pattern would threaten the child she had already decided was hers.
The midpoint reinterpretation extended to Daniel too.
His mother had manipulated documents and other women.
But she had not created his attraction to Vanessa.
He could not use the conspiracy to erase his marriage betrayal.
Everyone carried a different portion of the wrong.
The largest reveal came from Megan.
Before Evergreen transferred B-19, Margaret asked whether she would be willing to carry “another embryo later” if the first failed.
Another embryo.
Megan assumed Margaret meant another donor embryo.
Daniel and I knew our records showed none remaining.
“Did she give you an ID?” Rachel asked.
Megan searched old messages.
She found one.
B-21.
The embryo whose genetic result had been inconclusive four years earlier.
Northstar had told us B-21 was discarded with the abnormal embryos.
Margaret had hidden more than two.
If B-21 still existed, the entire inventory Daniel and I had been given was false.
Rachel subpoenaed storage history again.
B-21 had left Northstar three years earlier.
No current location.
Recipient file:
SEALED BY COURT ORDER.
May you like
A court had already been involved with one of our embryos.
And none of us knew why.
