Blue eyes.
My chest contracted.
A young man named Charles explained more.
“There’s a pattern,” he said. “A donor. Too many children. Even if families demanded otherwise… In the end, they still had children who looked like him.”
“Why?” I asked.
“The owner,” he said quietly. “She’s connected to him. She pushed his rehearsals. Ignored the rules.”
My hands started to shake.
“And the girl?” I asked.
He nodded.
“She’s from this donor.”
The room felt like it was closing.
A man.
Dozens of children.
All with the same face.
The same features.
The same… Look. Look.
As Emma.
The moment everything clicked
I don’t remember driving anymore.
But somehow I ended up in front of Mark’s office.
I was sitting there staring at the building.
And then it hit me.
Not all at once.
But enough.
Red hair.
Freckles.
Blue eyes.
My hands started to shake.
“No…” I whispered.
But deep inside…
I already knew it. Only to illustrate the truth, for
the
I was not ready. I entered his office.
He looked up in surprise.
“Claire? What are you doing here?”
I closed the door behind me.
And asked the question that had already smashed everything in me:
“Why did you donate your sperm?”
Silence.
Then—
“What are you talking about?”
“I was talking to someone from the clinic,” I said. “They gave me your name.”
It was a lie.
But it worked.
His face changed.
And in that moment—
I had my answer.
“I did it for Emma,” he said.
The words hit me like a slap.
“What?”
“I couldn’t let her go,” he said, his voice vocal. “I thought… if I put something of mine out maybe… someone would have a child who look like here.”
Tears filled my eyes.
“So you tried to replace her?”
“No!” he shouted. “I just… I needed to see here again.”
I shook my head.
“That’s not grief,” I said quietly. “That’s obsession.”
And then I asked the question I already knew the answer to:
“The owner of the clinic… were you grieving with her too?”
He flinched.
And that was enough.
The End of Us
“You should have gone to therapy,” I said. “We could’ve faced this together.”
“I didn’t mean for it to go this far,” he said.
“But it did.”
I wiped my tears.
“You song. You cheated. And you brought children into this world under false pretenses.”
“Claire, please—we can fix this.”
I shook my head slow.
“No,” I said.
“You broke us the moment you chose all of this… over honesty.”
I left his office without turning around.
I was sitting outside in my car.
For a long moment, I just breathed.
Really breathed.
For the first time in ten years.
Then I took my phone and called.
“I want to make an appointment,” I said. “I want to start the divorce process.”
A new one early years
I was chasing something I could never get back.
One moment.
A memory.
A life that ended far too soon.
But that day, I realized something:
Emma didn’t need to be replaced.
It did not need to be recreated.
She had been real.
She had been loved.
And that was enough.
For the first time in a decade…
I didn’t live in the past anymore.
I decided myself.
And maybe—just maybe—
I could still be a mother again.
But this time… With honesty.
With healing.
And with a future that finally belonged to me.
More on this on the next page
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