…”was married to my best friend. Laura. After Sam died, she asked me to be her donor.”
I sat down very slowly. Sam had been my husband Ben’s best friend since kindergarten. He died of cancer four years ago, at thirty-two. Ben gave the eulogy. I held Laura’s hand at the funeral.
Ben told me the rest through tears. Sam and Laura had wanted children, but Sam’s treatment left him unable to father any. Before he died, he asked Ben, privately, if he would help Laura have a baby one day, if she wanted one. Ben promised. A year later, Laura asked him. Ben went to a fertility specialist, who found that while his childhood illness had damaged his fertility, a small number of healthy cells could still be retrieved surgically. Laura’s son, Sammy, was born two years ago through IVF.
“I didn’t tell you because I thought you’d be hurt that I could help her and not us,” he said. “The doctor said the chance of us conceiving naturally was almost zero. When you told me you were pregnant, I thought it was impossible. I didn’t think. I just accused you.”
I was angry on so many levels that I couldn’t sort them out. He’d hidden a child. He’d made a decision about his body, and about our family, without me. And then he’d called me a cheater for something that was, it turned out, a tiny miracle.
The fertility specialist confirmed it at our next appointment: “almost zero” is not zero. Ben’s treatment had shown his fertility was low but not absent. It had happened naturally.
I asked Ben to move into the guest room for a while. We started counseling. He apologized again and again, and slowly I began to believe that his secret had come from a promise to a dying friend, not from a desire to deceive me. The accusation was harder to forgive.
After our daughter was born, Ben didn’t ask for a DNA test. I insisted on one anyway, so there would never be a question. She was his, of course.
I met Laura and Sammy properly when our daughter was a month old. Laura apologized for asking Ben to keep it quiet. I told her I understood grief makes people protect each other in strange ways.
Sammy and my daughter are half-siblings. They’re also, as Laura puts it, “the two kids Sam would have spoiled rotten.” Every year on Sam’s birthday, our two families go to the beach he loved. The kids build sandcastles. Ben tells them stories about Sam until the sun goes down.
