I never imagined I’d be writing this from a hospital recliner, my feet swollen beyond recognition, my sister’s last voicemail saved on repeat like a talisman against the silence she left behind.
But here I am. Thirty-four weeks pregnant with my dead sister’s baby, wondering if I’m about to lose the last piece of her I have left.
My sister Lily was the kind of person who made you feel like the world was softer just because she existed in it. She was three years older than me, relentlessly optimistic, the one who sent you birthday cards even when she was broke and exhausted and fighting through life like everyone else.
She tried to have a baby for six years.
Six years of failed cycles. Six years of hormones that wrecked her moods and her body. Six years of awkward baby showers where she’d smile too hard and then cry in my bathroom afterward. Six years of watching everyone else build the family she wanted more than anything.
Her husband, Mark, was there through all of it. Or at least I thought he was.
When Lily’s doctors finally said her uterus couldn’t carry a pregnancy safely, she collapsed into me in the parking lot of the fertility clinic, sobbing so hard I thought she was having a seizure. I held her on the concrete while people pretended not to stare.
“I don’t care how,” she said between gasps. “I just want to be a mom.”
A year later, she called me out of the blue.
“I need to ask you something,” she said. Her voice was shaking.
I knew what she was going to say before she said it. I just never imagined she’d ask me.
“Would you… would you carry my baby?”
The room went quiet around me. I remember the hum of my fridge, the neighbor’s dog barking, the way my coffee had gone cold in my hands.
I wasn’t married. I didn’t have kids. I wasn’t planning on kids anytime soon. But I loved Lily more than anyone in the world.
So I said yes.
We went through months of paperwork, therapy sessions, legal consultations, bloodwork. I injected myself with hormones that made my joints ache and my face break out like I was sixteen again. I gained weight, lost hair, cried at commercials.
The embryo was Lily’s egg and Mark’s sperm.
This was always supposed to be their baby. I was just the house it lived in.
Lily came to every appointment. She held my hand during the embryo transfer, tears running down her face like she was the one being operated on.
When the test came back positive, she screamed so loudly in the bathroom of the fertility clinic that the nurses rushed in thinking something was wrong.
For the first time in years, she looked alive again.
Four months later, Lily died in a car accident.
She was driving home from work, less than five miles from her house. A drunk driver ran a red light and slammed into her side of the car.
They told us she died instantly. I cling to that like it’s a promise.
Mark called me screaming. My mom collapsed in the kitchen. My dad punched a hole in the garage wall.
And I stood there, one hand on my stomach, thinking, She’ll never feel her baby kick.
The weeks after her funeral blurred together. I kept expecting her to show up at my door with soup or baby books or some ridiculous onesie she found online.
Instead, it was Mark who started showing up.
At first, it was comforting. He’d bring groceries. He’d talk to my belly in that awkward way people do when they don’t know what to say. He told me Lily would have loved the way I was carrying her child.
Then the tone shifted.
He started calling the baby his baby. Not Lily’s. Not ours. His.
“I’ve been reading about bonding,” he said one afternoon, sitting in my living room like he owned it. “I think it would be better if I was there when the baby kicks. For the connection.”
I was too tired to fight it, so I let him put his hand on my stomach.
The baby kicked.
Mark cried.
I went to my room and cried too, but not for the same reason.
By the time I was six months pregnant, he’d started pushing boundaries.
He asked if I planned to breastfeed.
“No,” I said. “I’m not the baby’s mother.”
“But breast milk is best,” he replied. “Lily would have wanted that.”
Every sentence started with Lily would have wanted.
He started showing me listings for apartments near his house.
“Wouldn’t it be easier if you were closer?” he said. “For visits.”
I reminded him I had a life, a job, a lease.
He smiled in that tight way that doesn’t reach the eyes.
“We’ll figure it out,” he said.
That was the first time I felt afraid.
Two weeks ago, my lawyer called me.
“You need to come in,” she said. Her voice was clipped, careful.
I waddled into her office and she closed the door behind me.
“Mark has filed a motion for full custody at birth,” she said.
I stared at her, not understanding the words.
“But… I’m not the mother,” I said. “This was always supposed to be Lily’s baby.”
“Yes,” she replied. “But Lily is no longer alive. And he is the biological father.”
My ears started ringing.
“He’s requesting that you have no contact after delivery,” she continued. “No visitation rights. No involvement.”
It felt like someone had ripped my chest open and poured ice water inside.
“He can’t do that,” I said. “She asked me to do this. She begged me.”
My lawyer sighed.
“We’ll fight it,” she said. “But you need to prepare yourself. Courts don’t usually side with surrogates who aren’t genetically related.”
I am genetically related. Lily was my sister. But not in a way the law seems to care about.
That night I listened to Lily’s voicemails on repeat. The ones she left when she was too tired to talk but wanted to say goodnight. The ones where she’d joke about how big my stomach was going to get.
In the last one, she said, “Thank you for carrying my miracle. I don’t know how to repay you.”
I whispered into the dark, “I’ll keep your baby safe. I promise.”
Now I don’t know if I can keep that promise.
Yesterday, Mark came over without asking.
He sat across from me at my kitchen table like we were negotiating a business deal instead of the future of the child growing inside me.
“I want to avoid drama,” he said. “This has been hard on both of us.”
“You filed to take the baby and erase me,” I snapped.
He flinched. Just a little.
“I need a clean slate,” he replied. “Every time I see you, I see Lily dying all over again.”
My hands shook so badly I had to press them between my thighs.
“You don’t get to rewrite her,” I said. “She loved me. She trusted me with her baby.”
“She’s gone,” he said flatly. “And I’m the only parent left.”
I stood up, the room spinning.
“You will never erase me from this child’s life,” I said.
He didn’t argue. He just looked at my stomach with something that wasn’t love.
It was ownership.
I’m due in six weeks.
I don’t know if I’ll be allowed to hold the baby after birth. I don’t know if I’ll be able to see the face Lily made inside me. I don’t know if the hospital will hand the baby to Mark and escort me out like I was just a rented room.
All I know is that my sister trusted me with the one thing she wanted more than life itself.
And now I’m terrified that when I finally hear this baby cry, it will also be the moment I lose her forever.
