Sweet Romance14 min read
I Went to the U.S. to Have My Baby and Met My Past
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"I can't believe we're actually at a music festival in Washington," Jana said, her voice bubbling. "Of all places."
"I booked the trip, so shut up and dance," I told her, lifting my water bottle like a tiny trophy.
"You're huge," Bella said, laughing as she poked my belly through the loose shirt. "When did you become a superhero?"
"I am not huge," I said, smiling. "I'm heroic."
The lights were bright, the crowd was loud, and my two best friends—Jana Pedersen and Bella Arellano—kept me anchored between them. I had told my family I was going to study for an LLM. They thought I was gone for school. I liked the lie because it was simple.
"Are you sure you don't want us to fly home?" Jana asked, her hand warm on my back.
"I'm fine. Really." I took a breath. It felt oddly steady. "This festival—it's just the sound I need. It makes me feel like everything is wide open, not stuck in a courtroom."
"Okay, but if anything happens, you scream and we carry you out like a queen," Bella said, grinning.
We danced. We sang. We drank coke and lemonades. At midnight the three of us climbed onto a grassy slope and watched fireworks. Jana dozed on my shoulder; Bella snored like a small freight train. I felt safe and ridiculous and so very, very alone all at once.
Then the pain hit.
"It feels like a hammer," I whispered, clutching my belly.
"That's a contraction," Bella said, immediately awake. "You need an ambulance."
"I am not letting an ambulance ruin my festival outfit," I joked, trying to keep my voice light. "Call one, Jana."
"Call who?" Jana mumbled, then sputtered awake and fumbled for her phone. "Oh my God."
"Do not panic," I told myself—out loud, to keep my voice calm. I counted breaths. I documented timings like a nerd with a stopwatch. Four minutes. Three. Two.
When the ambulance came, the paramedics were efficient and kind and full of noises I half understood. In the emergency room a doctor checked my monitors and his face tightened.
"Fetal heart rate decelerations," he said in English. Then, in clear, resonant Mandarin: "胎心减弱，要人工破水。"
I blinked. That voice.
I said, "Excuse me, is that…?"
He turned, and for one slow second the fluorescent lights made him look like a saint and a traitor at the same time.
"Finnegan?" I said, the name a surprised bark.
He looked as surprised as I did. "Kimora?"
Of all the people in Washington, in this hospital, in this delivery suite, of course my ex would be the one on duty.
He moved with the steady calm of someone who had memorized how the world should feel. "Fetal meconium," he said, switching from Mandarin back to English. "We need to prepare for cesarean."
"No," I said. "Please. I—"
"You asked," he said, looking at me like he was reading an old draft he had once edited. "You asked for a chance to labor. But the baby is in distress. This is safer."
"I asked to try," I said. "I'll walk. I'll do breathing. I'll—"
He looked at me with the same expression he had used the day I broke up with him: kind, clinical, and impossible to read. "You asked to try," he repeated. "Now we do what's safe."
I held his sleeve like a lifeline. "Please, Finnegan. I begged you on the coffee table of your small apartment. I walked ten thousand steps every day so I could push. Let me keep trying."
He inhaled and finally, something soft softened his mouth. "You were very stubborn then," he said. "Very stubborn now."
"Don't make me cry," I snapped, which was a lie because the tears started anyway.
They took me into the operating room more quickly than I knew possible. The anesthetic stung. There was pressure, then a great sound that hit me in the chest like a bell.
"A cry," someone announced.
"A boy," another voice answered.
"He smells like the sea," Jana whispered from somewhere, and I cried so hard my chest hurt for different reasons.
They placed him on my chest. He wrinkled, pink and furious, and then he opened a fissure of a mouth and rendered the world insignificant.
"He looks like you," Bella whispered, blinking.
"He's perfect," I said. "He's mine."
When they stitched me up, Finnegan waited at the edge of the curtain. Jana and Bella were loud and messy and so very proud. They ruffled my hair, they argued about names, they asked the same questions three times. I needed rest. I wanted to be left alone for two minutes with this small, impossible life.
But then a quiet moment arrived: Finnegan sat in the chair across the room like an accused god.
"Why did you say English and Chinese?" I asked through stitches and murmurs.
"I've been working on my Mandarin," he said. "I thought—"
"You used to be a neurosurgeon," I said, still half laughing with disbelief. "How did you become…today's hero?"
"Temporary assignment," he said. "Emergency cover."
"Same old Finnegan," I muttered.
Over the next days, he came and went like a shadow, a steady presence. He apologized for things I didn't want to hear. He asked me about the baby, about the donor, and about me.
"This child—" he said one afternoon, eyes on my half-empty water glass. "Is he—"
"Donor sperm," I finished for him. "I wanted a child. I wanted it to be mine." I watched his reaction with a private, nervous curiosity.
He blinked. "You're brave," he said, in a voice that always made me expect snow and math problems.
"I am stubborn," I corrected.
He laughed, which felt like being forgiven and punished at once. "You insist on making things hard on yourself."
"Some people like hard things," I said. "Look at you becoming an obstetrician in a crisis."
He shrugged. "We take turns being brave."
He helped with the small things: changing a diaper at three a.m., Googling lullabies I couldn't pronounce, and putting away blankets. He became the kind of ordinary that slowly became everything.
"You and I should be practical," I said once, eyes half-closed while the baby slept between us like a small, warm planet. "We can't be dramatic forever."
"I don't want drama," Finnegan said. "I want soap and a quiet life where the only thing we need to fight is whether to put extra cheese on the pizza."
I laughed then. "You'd go to war for extra cheese."
"I would," he said.
Our life settled into something like a clumsy dance. Jana and Bella were angels and chaos in equal measure. They sanitized their visits into adorable chaos—dressing the baby in ridiculous costumes, tying bows the size of frisbees. I told them not to, but they did and my heart laughed.
"Who signs the birth certificate?" Jana asked one morning, one eyebrow arched as if she were solving an important puzzle.
"I will," I said. "This child only needs me."
"You're sure?" Bella asked.
"I'm sure."
When I stopped telling people the half-truths—when I took off the small lies like a costume—the world became lighter. I told my parents in a message that blurred into a call. They were furious and then stunned and then smitten through the buffer of a phone screen. They asked questions like lawyers—clear, precise, with thin layers of sarcasm. They worried about money, about school, about every practical nail. I answered as best I could, and when their anger softened, it did so to a kind I did not expect: worry that couldn't quite hide affection.
Grant Otto, however, was less subtle than my parents. He had always adored the idea of us as a pair—talent and strategy married to the right story. When Jana let slip that I might be thinking of not marrying, Grant's voice was a resource assessment.
"Kimora," he said, like a man who had always been permitted to be blunt, "marriage snaps the problem into place."
"No," I said. "Marriage should never be a problem solver."
"Listen." He was methodical. "If you accept, I will sign the paperwork, I will tell both families, I will be the respectable husband. Your child will be recognized. You won't lose face. I get to be the man who rescues a scandal and gains a family heir."
"So you're offering to husband me and adopt my child as a business strategy," I said. "That is either a proposal or a tax plan."
"It is practical," he said. "We both win."
I told him no. He did not like that answer. He continued to present it as a necessary math problem, as if feelings were variables to rearrange.
"You are being dramatic," he told me once in a crowded coffee shop, leaning over the table with that bossy stare. "This is good for both of us."
"This is my life," I said. "Not a boardroom slide."
"You will change your mind," he said. "People always do."
People do change their minds—but the direction is never guaranteed. I moved to Washington, took a part-time job editing a law journal, and carved out nights of small, simple joy. Finnegan regained his old department after a tribunal cleared him—but he had already made a decision. He resigned to take care of us during my early months after the birth. He lost his license for a year for crossing a line in an emergency—he had performed an unauthorized cesarean to save my baby and me. He didn't fight it.
"You did the right thing," I told him, hugging him one night after a long feeding, my face pressed against his shirt.
"No one can take this away," he whispered. "They took my certificate, not my hands."
We moved back to our city. My parents arrived and were unexpectedly moved by the child. "He is so like you," my father said, his voice soft in a way that made me dizzy. They came and saw the small life we'd made and left with packages and promises and softened edges. There was a kind of truce made by the sight of a sleeping child.
Grant Otto did not go gently. Months later, after I had returned to work part-time and started saving, he resurfaced. He had not aged in any meaningful way; he wore the same tidy hair and the same smugness. He wanted to be practical again. He wanted to tie up the loose ends he thought I was letting fly.
"I can make things easier," he said in a room full of partners from his firm, where I had been invited to speak about a small paper. "Think about what's best for the family."
I had a microphone in my hand. The room smelled of strong coffee and thick leather. Grant had invited himself to my appearance with the polite confidence of a man who thought he belonged.
"You think family is a ledger," I said, letting the sentence fall like a bell. "You think love is only numbers."
He smiled, slow and confident. "Isn't it?"
"No," I said. "Sometimes love is a single, messy decision that refuses to be arranged."
Grant stepped closer, his colleagues watching with polite interest. "Kimora," he said, "I made an offer before. You laughed. I made you reasonable. You made me better. Why not get legal benefits, stability, and a child with a proper name on his birth certificate?"
"Because your offer is a contract," I said. "And my child is not property you register."
A partner from his firm—an older man with a careful comb-over—stood up. "Kimora, this is a professional event. We are all friends here. The tone—"
My phone buzzed. A message light flashed. I opened it. The screen lit up with a series of texts dated months ago—texts I had not seen. They were from Grant, planning how to tell people, discussing how to pass our child's identity around like a pawn. He had discussed calling my parents, how he would 'manage' them, how he would 'place' me in a role that would be flattering to his image. One message said, "If she resists, make her feel small until she says yes."
My hand did not shake. I read a short passage out loud.
"'If she resists, make her feel small until she says yes,'" I said into the microphone. The partners near Grant shifted. "That's you."
The room went quiet enough to hear the HVAC hum.
"That's overstepping," someone murmured.
Grant's face flushed the color of cheap wine. He tried to smile. "Those were hypothetical phrases," he said. "Taken out of context."
"Show me one text where you ever asked if I wanted this," I said. "Show me one moment you tried to understand me."
He couldn't. The silence bit him.
"You're proposing using marriage as damage control," I told the room. "You were ready to adopt instead of loving. You proposed keeping my child as a neat column on your balance sheet. You think that's a win."
There were sounds—soft gasps, a clink of a cup. A junior partner at Grant’s side, a woman named Antonia Lucas, opened her mouth and then closed it. Another man checked his phone.
"Grant," I said, my voice narrower than I felt. "People in this room might admire you for number-crunching. I want people in this room to know you're willing to pin people's lives down like stamps."
He rallied. "This is private—"
"No," I said. "It's not private when you send messages about coercion. It's not private when your plan treats me like a step in spreadsheet growth." I turned the phone to show the texts to the nearest two people. Their faces shifted as if they had seen a private photograph of a friend being cruel.
A woman near the back, Camilla Browning, stood up. She had helped me at the journal once. "If this is true," she said, "we should be appalled."
A man who had been listening, Edric Olson, pulled out his phone. "I have copies of emails," he said. "If he tried to pressure you at work, we have records."
The murmur grew. People moved away from Grant subtly, like a tide pulling out. His cheeks were pale now; for the first time in months his smile did not hold.
"What do you want, Kimora?" he said finally, voice thin. "A spectacle? A show? Is this how you want to be known? For exposure?"
"I want honesty," I said. "And I want people to see you for the man who would suggest making a child's life another transaction."
"You're ruining me," he said. He sounded terrified, like someone who had believed his own infallibility all his life.
"You looked at one woman—my best friend—like she was a plan," I said. "You marked people and calculated outcomes. You do not get to decide the child's life."
At that, his colleagues started to shift their chairs. Private messages started sliding across phones like wet ink. One of Grant's partners turned to him, then to the group.
"This is messy," the partner said. "But our firm values transparency. We will review these communications."
That phrase—"review these communications"—felt like a rope around Grant’s neck. People murmured. Someone took a photo of the texts and posted it silently to a group chat. Within an hour the firm's HR had scheduled a meeting.
Grant's reaction was a spectrum: surprise, then denial, then anger, then the small panic of a man losing control. His voice thickened. "This is a smear," he said. "I'm the one offering stability."
"You offered exploitation," I said. "And you will have to explain yourself to people who choose who they partner with, not who they partner with to look good."
Outside the room, two interns whispered and laughed, not cruelly, but with the sweet, sharp sound of people seeing pretension collapse. Someone—no one famous—took a photo of him walking out. It circulated like a canon shot.
Grant's public punishments came in pieces.
First, the board called him in. They told him he would be removed from certain committees. His client, a small but prestigious trust, asked for a new contact. An ally texted, "Mate, I didn't know you wrote those lines." His mother called him; I later learned she said nothing but the disappointment was raw enough to be heard through tone alone.
At a partner meeting his ex-lieutenants looked at him like a man who had been found selling fake watches. He tried to explain but the words made him smaller. He attempted to defend his "practicality." They countered with demands for apology and training. Most importantly, he lost the moral high ground he'd expected to cash in on.
When he came to my parents' home offering to "help" and asked why I had humiliated him at a professional event, my mother—who adored a courtroom—sat like a judge.
"Do you want our daughter's happiness," she asked in a voice that could fold steel. "Or do you want a scenario where you profit from her life?"
He stammered. "I wanted to secure the child."
"By making her your product?" my father asked. He had always been the one to call things like they are. Grant's guilt was not the steady, cinematic collapse you read in novels. It was small degradations: fewer invitations, colleagues who stopped answering, partners who withdrew endorsements. People at networking events stopped calling him a future name and started calling him a cautionary tale.
There was one moment that satisfied a deep, private justice. Grant was asked to give a short talk at a charity gala months later. The room was full of donors who had once admired his sharp suit. He walked on stage, smiling. Halfway through—halfway through the sentence where he tried to dramatize contracts as "family bonds"—a woman in the front row stood up.
"How would you feel," she asked, "if a man told your daughter he would make her family into a statement for his profile?"
There were cameras. People turned their phones with careful, hungry fingers. His colleagues watched like judges. He tried to recover, but the damage was social, and in our era social ruin is a slow-acting toxin.
Grant's reaction went through angles I've seen before: deflection, grovel, the attempt to rewrite history. He sent an email to every partner, then a carefully worded apology, then a longer one suggesting he "misused language." His father—someone who had built a practice on reputation—told him quietly to step away from the firm for a while. Clients moved their funds. One former client posted a curt message about the need for ethical behavior in leadership. Grant became a man who used to be everywhere and had slipped to nowhere. He was still breathing; that was the problem for him. He had to live with the knowledge that he had been exposed and judged.
I did not celebrate his fall. I simply walked past it, a woman with a child who slept in her arms and friends who cheered at small victories. But the public humbling satisfied a melodic sense of justice inside me. It showed the world that kindness cannot be replaced with calculation.
"Do you feel better?" Jana asked later, handing me a coffee.
"I feel free," I answered. "Not because he's gone, but because the price I paid for staying true to my child is worth it."
"You're brave," Bella said.
"Stubborn," I corrected, smiling.
Finnegan came to family dinners, his presence a lighthouse. His sister, Svetlana Delgado, gave me the first kind word of adult sisterhood. "You two look right," she said one evening, watching us assemble tiny socks like sailors. "Not perfect. Right."
"Right is good," I said.
We named the baby Finn Clarke. He learned to giggle in a way that made the kitchen melt. He learned to crawl and then to walk. He learned to point at things and make demands that were equally terrifying and heart-splitting.
One night, when the winter wind made the windows ring, I found the small spring-loaded toy I had brought to the hospital—a stupid metal fist that jumped midair when pressed. Finnegan had always teased me about it.
"You kept that?" he asked, running a thumb along the faded metal.
"I kept your absence and your presence," I said. "I kept our mistakes and our apologies."
He smiled the small smile that belonged to a man who had found a way to be better than before.
"Will you marry me?" he asked once, in a way that did not expect a contract but asked for a life.
I looked at my son asleep in the next room, the faint rise and fall of his chest like a tide.
"Will you promise to be here when it's hard and when it's messy?"
"I promise," he said. His eyes were small, earnest, and open.
"Then yes," I said.
We married quietly, a small ceremony with two laughter-filled friends, my parents, and a sister who had shown me how to forgive. We did not wear crowns or march to altars refusing the truth. We brought coffee and small sandwiches and a cake that said "Finn" in clumsy icing.
Grant Otto, months later, sold his stake in a firm for reasons he called "a change," and moved quietly out of the orbit we all shared. He sent a message of apology the day my son turned two. I read it twice and then I deleted it. Some closures are small acts, like unsubscribing from a newsletter you never liked.
"What does being a mother feel like?" Jana asked me on a bad morning when Finn had decided sleep was a suggestion.
"It feels like having the sun fall out of the sky and into your hands," I said. "And also like peeing your pants when you laugh."
She laughed and slapped my arm. Bella made coffee. Finnegan wrapped a blanket around our son and kissed the crown of his head like a benediction.
Outside, the city moved on. People made plans, crashed, and reconciled. We lived in a small, ordinary apartment full of mismatched plates. We had fights that ended in apologies, and quiet evenings where we read law reviews aloud to one another like bedtime stories. Finnegan sometimes teased me about how I had called him a "milk thief" when he would sneak a bottle at midnight. I teased him back about cooking disasters.
We keep the spring-loaded fist on the mantel. When I feel small, I press it and it jumps and lands on the table like a tiny boom. It makes me laugh every time.
One day, when Finn is older, he will hold it and ask what it meant.
"It means we kept the little things," I'll say. "And the big ones too."
We learned that family is messy and brave and that promises are not signatures but a slow, patient staying. We learned to build a life where laughter and arguments and midnight feedings stacked up like steady bricks.
I look across the room sometimes at Finnegan and he will be making faces at our son. "Mom," he says quietly, catching my eye. "We're alright."
"I'm stubborn," I say.
"No," he says. "You're stubborn, brave, and mine. So am I."
We both laugh, and the little metal fist on the mantel clicks like a tiny applause.
The End
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