“Honey, you can’t expect to fix everything.” Natalie couldn’t, but I could. Astonishingly. I was in a position to make Amelia happy. The feeling of weightlessness from earlier returned.

Natalie held my gaze. “Sometimes I think some relative died and my mom and dad had to take me in. My mom acts like I ought to be someone else’s responsibility.”

She stood and walked to the window. Her third-floor bedroom, with its two large windows, faced a quiet street. In and among tree branches, it felt like a tree house.

She leaned her hands on the panes and pressed her face up to the glass. “I want to live with you,” she said.

“Natalie…” My pulse quickened. My shirt was damp with perspiration. I needed my relationship with Natalie to work alongside the surrogacy, not in competition. I thought about the most appropriate way to respond to her. She might repeat what I said to her parents. “I would do anything for you.”

“Let me stay with you,” she said.

“I’d love for you to stay with me. For a night or a weekend or even longer.”

“I mean live with you.”

“You don’t really want that. You … you just need time to process everything.”

“I’ve had a whole life with them,” she said. “I don’t need time.”

“Honey, it’s a rough patch,” I said. “Things will get better.”

“Please don’t be a surrogate,” she said. “You were my friend. And now they’ve taken you for themselves.”

I had increasing anxiety, recognizing that Natalie wasn’t going to accept the surrogacy easily. I needed to find a way to appease her. For my own peace of mind. I didn’t realize how much her unhappiness would weigh on me.

“Whether or not I’m a surrogate, it doesn’t change our friendship.”

She stared out the window. She was quiet for a few minutes.

My eyes landed on her green science folder. “How’s your science project going?”

She crossed to the desk, opened the science folder, and looked over her completed pages of work.

Natalie had spent time explaining each unicorn in her room to me, but hadn’t ever mentioned the large black unicorn lamp on her desk, and I hadn’t noticed it, perhaps because it was an abstract sculpture. Unless you were up close, you wouldn’t necessarily identify the lamp as a unicorn, but once you did, it was mildly unsettling.

She flipped through several pages and then stopped. “This is wrong.” She sat down and took a pencil, eraser, and sharpener from her desk drawer. She erased several formulas.

“All of this is hard for you,” I said.

“I want them to give it up.” She started over, writing several formulas in a column.

“I understand how you feel.”

Through the window, a bright red cardinal, perched on a nearby branch, was calling out to its mate.