PART 3: A Broke College Graduate Got Pregnant After One Night With the Wrong Man, Then Discovered Her Unborn Twins Could Steal a Billion-Dollar Empire From the Woman He Loved

Maya Bennett found out she was pregnant in a clinic bathroom with chipped blue tiles, a broken soap dispenser, and forty-three dollars in her checking account.

The nurse had given her the test results in a voice too gentle for the size of the disaster. Positive. Six weeks. Maybe twins, judging by the hormone levels, but they would need an ultrasound to be sure.

Maya sat on the closed toilet seat and stared at the paper until the letters stopped looking like English.

Pregnant.

She almost laughed. Not because it was funny. Because sometimes life gets so ridiculous that your body chooses the wrong response.

Six weeks ago, she had been drunk in a cheap hotel room after finding out her boyfriend had been sleeping with a woman from his office. She had ordered what she thought was a male escort because heartbreak, tequila, and humiliation had apparently worked together to murder her common sense. Then a man knocked on her door. Tall. Dazed. Beautiful in that cold, expensive way men in magazines looked when they were pretending not to know they were beautiful.

She had pulled him inside before he could explain.

In the morning, she had woken first, remembered enough to want the floor to swallow her, grabbed her clothes, and fled.

She never got his name.

Now she was pregnant.

Maya pressed a hand against her stomach. Nothing showed yet. Her body looked exactly like it had yesterday, which felt almost rude. Shouldn’t disaster announce itself somehow? A crack in the mirror. A siren. A dramatic clap of thunder. Something.

Her phone buzzed with a bank notification.

Rent due in three days.

Maya shut her eyes.

She had moved to Chicago for Ryan, a man who said he loved her but apparently loved convenience more. He had promised they would build a life after graduation. Instead, he built a life with his coworker, and Maya ended up alone in a studio apartment with secondhand furniture, a dying laptop, and no friends close enough to call at nine in the morning with the sentence, “I got pregnant by a stranger I accidentally invited into a hotel room.”

The doctor had mentioned options.

Options sounded polite. Options sounded professional. Options sounded like something people discussed in clean offices when they had savings, support, and someone to drive them home afterward.