I wasn’t listening anymore. I was suspended above my body, watching my new life emerge.

The lease on my Crown Heights apartment was up May 15. I tried and failed to get out early. Since I had enough money in the bank to cover both apartments for an overlapping month, I never mentioned the situation to the Straubs. The extra rent was a small price to pay. I didn’t want to wait.

Once I began packing, my cat, Eliza, tried to sabotage the move. She stood in front of the kitchen cabinet that held my pots and pans so I couldn’t reach them. When I tried to pack the dishes, she blocked that cabinet too. Eventually I gave up and locked her in my bedroom.

The move proved an opportunity for me to streamline my belongings and part with old clothing, photos, and knickknacks that were weighing me down, literally and figuratively. In the process, I cleaned up the digital files on my hard drive that I no longer needed. I had folders full of images dating back ten years. I held on to the best ones, in case the clients returned for more prints, but deleted many of them.

I had twenty-two folders of my private photoshopped images, representing twenty-two families. Of course, the twenty-two folders were a small fraction of all my clients. But those were the families who had made an impression on me. In certain cases, there was a story to be told, with groups of images that conveyed something about a life I’d shared with someone. In other cases, it was just a matter of one or two gratifying pictures.

I opened the Straub, Alternates folder. Clicking through the photos, I stopped when I came to the pictures of me and Fritz in bed together. I had done impressive work in making the photos feel alive. In my estimation, they were artistic creations. I’d successfully fabricated an expression of ecstasy on Fritz’s face. Some of the photos were tight on our body parts and some allowed a view of the whole scene. I stopped again when I came to the photoshopped pictures of Amelia and me and took a few minutes to savor the image of us sharing a piece of birthday cake. I felt uneasy leaving all the images on my hard drive, now that I would be living in the Straub home. So, painful though it was, I deleted each photo individually, followed by the entire folder.

Ian and I were having coffee around the corner from my apartment, at his insistence. The coffee shop was mostly empty, except for one woman with headphones working on her laptop in the far corner.

He was angry when he learned about my being the Straubs’ surrogate. But I wasn’t inclined to discuss my choices with him.

“Have you ever heard of generosity?” I said.