The first result is his official website. One click of the mouse and I’m met with a shiny black page highlighted with neon accents and peppered with modern, sexy fonts. Various menu options offer up videos, articles, and ways to get in touch with his team. I click on the image gallery, soaking in the highly-edited action shots as well as a few menswear pictures that have probably graced the glossy pages of GQ and Esquire at some point.
I study the sharp angles of his jaw, his straight nose, and the perfect angles of his eyebrows which are neither bushy or unmanageable and identical in shape to Lucia’s.
I’ll never forget lying on that cold table, my feet in stirrups, a fluorescent light stinging my eyes overhead.
“All right. Time to make a baby,” Dr. Wickham said as he perched on the rolling stool at the foot of the exam table and his associate handed him a long tube full of donor sperm. It wasn’t exactly magical. Definitely not romantic. And of course it wasn’t how I imagined starting the journey to motherhood. The doctor told me to lie back and relax—impossible, but I tried. Thirty seconds later, it was over. Ambitious Athlete’s unfrozen seed was officially inside of me. The rest was up to my body.
We did a natural round, no hormones necessary since I’ve always had an impeccable twenty-eight day cycle. The doctor told me I had a fifteen to twenty percent chance of it working in any given round, and not to be disappointed if it took two, three, four, even eight rounds.
But she took the first time.
Nine months later, I held Lucia in my arms, my mother and sister beside me, each of us weeping tears of joy—save for Lucia who was simply hungry.
I’ve occasionally daydreamed about meeting her donor someday, but in these scenarios it’s always when Lucia is older. Maybe she does a DNA test and discovers a half sibling or two. They meet up. Her biological father is there. That sort of thing. And in these daydreams, I’m there, too—but only because I want to thank him for the beautiful gift he gave me.
Running another search on Fabian, I glean that he has no children of his own. Only a string of relationships with young, beautiful, international models. A deeper search shows he wasn’t making headlines until closer to his mid-twenties. His life before that is a mystery, save for a one-paragraph personal life summary on his Wikipedia page.
Fabian Catalano was born in Chicago, Illinois. After attending Wakecrest University on a tennis scholarship, he moved to California to train under famed tennis coach Reed Cartwright. His parents are the late Grace (DuBois) and Gianni Catalano. He has never been married, is currently single, and keeps a primary residence in Los Angeles.
That’s it.
Mere scraps.
I spend the rest of the afternoon combing through various interviews he’s done on talk shows—and I stop when I get to the one where the invasive, chatty blonde host asks if he and his then-fiancée (who happened to be his long-time coach’s daughter) had thought about how many kids they wanted to have after they tied the knot. And before he had a chance to answer, she rattled off some witticism about how beautiful their babies would be.
Fabian scoffed, going off on the woman for assuming that every couple who marries automatically wants children. After that he yanked the microphone off and stormed off stage while the host gathered her composure.
This particular interview took place a mere two months ago.
It’s impossible to know when he donated his sperm. I can only assume it was during his college days. Maybe he needed some extra cash? Men that young aren’t necessarily thinking about the long-term repercussions of their actions.
I re-read the letter one last time, letting the realization sink in that he had recently requested the remainder of his sample be destroyed.
Tightness floods my chest when I think of my daughter someday knowing who he is and having her heart broken when she sees this interview. The man clearly has no desire for children. Which is fine. That’s his prerogative. But if a nosy little interview question about babies sets him into a hot-headed rage on a television set, how would he act if his own daughter were to someday reach out to him?
I glance at the file cabinet, and I decide to tuck this entire day into the recesses of my mind.
We never needed him anyway.
And we never will.
Chapter 2
Fabian
* * *
“Hey, you have time for a phone call?” My new assistant, Taylor, sashays across my private tennis court.
While everyone in my camp assumes I hired her because she’s got perky tits and a tight ass, I simply chose her because she’s young and malleable. There’s nothing worse than hiring someone’s used assistant and having to break them of all their old habits. This one’s fresh out of college, and this gig is officially her first job.
I have hope.
Wiping the sweat from my brow, I nod toward my coach on the opposite end of the court. “I don’t know, Taylor. Does it look like I have time?”
I almost feel bad biting her head off like that, but this is how she’s going to learn.
That and I’ve only reminded her six separate times since she started last week that my court time is sacred.
Coach Cartwright tosses his hands in the air, his annoyance taking the shape of a grimace on his face.
Biting her overinflated lips, Taylor skips closer, phone in hand. “They’ve called several times in a row. I let it go to voicemail at first, but then they kept calling. They said it’s urgent.”
“Take a message … that’s what I pay you to do.”
“I tried, but they insisted.” She pouts like a damned toddler. Hesitating. Then she steps closer, tucking her chin. “It’s a doctor’s office.” Her attention spans to Coach and back. “Dr. Wickham. In Chicago. It’s a fertility—"
Before she can finish her sentence, I shove my racket at her and trade it for the phone, heading inside to deal with this nonsense. Last month I had my attorney draft up a destruction mandate for some sperm I donated back when I was a broke college kid. At the time I was barely twenty-one, a senior in college, and in desperate need of cash to replace the catalytic converter in my piece of shit Oldsmobile. A clinic in the next town over was offering five hundred bucks per donation—all I had to do was fill out an application, submit some bloodwork, and if accepted, it was easy (if not awkward) money.
I must have donated half a dozen times that year—and that summer Cartwright hand-selected me as his next “project.” He’d seen me play in some college invitationals and was convinced I was going to be the next big thing in the tennis world.
He wasn’t wrong.
“This is Fabian,” I answer once inside and out of earshot of staff.
For the past sixteen years, my life has been a whirlwind of beautiful women, trips around the world, endorsement deals, and fat checks.
It wasn’t until the catastrophic end of a recent engagement that I remembered the donations I’d made to that clinic outside Chicago. While the contract I signed at the time was ironclad, I hired one of the most powerful law firms in that area to draft up a proposal to destroy any remaining donation. My attorneys said it shouldn’t be a problem given my “celebrity status,” but legally, they owed me nothing.
“Hi, Fabian, this is Rhonda Bixby. I’m the clinic manager at Dr. Wickham’s office.” Her voice is saccharin-sweet, dripping with honey. Sometimes people get like this when they’re starstruck, but in this case I’ve said a mere three words. “We received your request last month to destroy the rest of your donation.” She pauses, clearing her throat. “And I’d like you to know that we have done so.”