I knew what he did with women who couldn’t produce, because I had watched him do it to my best friend for six years.

So she did not try.

She went to a clinic in Tucson, three hundred miles away, in the summer of 2023, and she paid for a cycle using donor material, and she chose the donor herself.

And she chose Brandon Lawson — Christopher’s cousin, who is forty-four, who has never held a job for longer than fourteen months, who has been on the family trust his entire adult life and has been quietly cut off from it twice — because he was a Lawson, and because a Lawson child would look like a Lawson, and no one would ever ask a question.

She approached him herself.