Page 54 of Forbidden Surrogate

“Okay. Damn.”

“How’s the baby today?” she asks, changing the subject as if our conversation didn’t just get strangely deep there for a minute.

“I don’t know. Fine.” I’m not in charge of whatever is going on down there. The baby seems to mostly make me tired and make me want to fart.

Angela smiles appreciatively, that wistfulness returning until she notices how suspiciously I’m looking at her. “Good. If she’s a girl, I can be her godmother.”

“Not if he’s a boy?” I ask Angela suspiciously as I survey my baby bump, wondering if I’m psychic enough to guess the gender from the shape of my stomach.

“I’ve had enough of the men in my family,” Angela explains.

“Is that why you’re so eager to leave me with Luigi?”

“I just don’t want him to lose himself,” she says with a wistful nostalgia that worries me again.

“Girl, don’t do anything too crazy, okay? You’re acting weird.”

“I just need you to trust me, Delphine. Luigi loves you.”

“How could you possibly know that? Did he use those words? Men want things they can’t have all the time. But they have a vision for how they want their life to look and I’ve spent the last thirty-something years gathering evidence that I’m not anybody’s dream girl.”

Angela’s face gets so serious again. “You shouldn’t ever talk like that, Delphine. There might be a lot of ignorant people in the world, but the second I met you, I knew we were meant to be sisters.”

“You definitely interfered with fate there.”

“However you want to explain it,” Angela says. “Just promise you won’t let Luigi lose himself.”

“Are you in trouble, Angela?”

I look at her face as if it will help me to read her mind. There’s definitely something different about this visit, but I can’t tell what it is. I can’t even guess. Just like Luigi, Angela keeps a lot of her inner thoughts a secret.

“No. I’m not. Nothing like that.” She sounds reassuring and believable. I can’t tell if she’s just a good liar, or if she’s being honest. I just know that I’m missing something.

“Are you sure?”

“I promise.”

Angela spends the rest of the night without saying much about Luigi and without acting as suspicious as she did during our more serious conversation. She leaves around 9 p.m. and I notice that nobody in her family picks her up – just like no one dropped her off.

That’s never happened for as long as I’ve known Angela and now, I’m convinced that something is very much wrong.

My initial suspicion is that Angela is staging this whole sketchy situation to get me to reach out to her brother. If that's her plan, it's working. She hasn't left the lake house for more than fifteen minutes when I feel a strange sense of panic coming over me. This isn't right, and I need to trust Luigi and tell him.

By 9:30 p.m., I can't contain the feeling that something might be wrong with Angela and that I should trust Luigi with my suspicions. I call him, half expecting the call to go to voicemail, but Luigi picks up in one ring.

"Your girls' night over already?"

"Angela told you she was coming over?"

"No, I've been looking for her and CC told me-- Wait, is Angela with you?"

Luigi has good instincts for trouble. He seems to have pieced together what might have happened faster than I could have.

"No. That's what I was calling about."

"Have you seen her tonight?"

"Yes. She was here for about three, four hours. She didn't even seem rushed, just weird."

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