Chapter 1
At the time of her 38th birthday, Haydee Beausoliel had to admit, she loved her life, for the most part. As an incredibly successful life coach, this was a very good thing. It was hard, after all, to convince other people that you could help them live their best life if you weren’t living yours.
She had her dream house in a gorgeous and exclusive gated community on Long Island near the Hamptons, a posh two bedroom loft apartment in the SoHo area of Lower Manhattan that she could retreat to when the winter weather called to be too rough to be tolerable on the island, and, after a particularly great year for her extensive asset portfolio on the market, she’d even picked up a darling townhouse in the Filter Square area of Philadelphia to make accommodating her favorite Phili based clients even more convenient.
Though she came from old money and lived a fairly opulent lifestyle now, Haydee still never thought of herself as being wealthy. She did her best to stay humble, and wanted, more than anything, to be a truly good person. Her weekends were spent largely volunteering for one cause or another, and she had yet to be embroiled in any of the scandals that seemed to besmirch some of her oldest and dearest friends’ names on the gossip pages each weekend. Haydee was even fairly certain that she was fairly well liked by most of her friends, family, and colleagues, which was a rarity in her circles for certain.
There wasn’t a significant other in her life, but, much to her mother’s consternation, Haydee preferred it that way. She’d been engaged to the son of one of her mother’s high society friends for a brief, miserable time after she’d gotten her Bachelor’s degree in Psychology, but she’d broken it off before returning to her studies to do post-grad work. His name was Thomas, and though she cared for him and even found him attractive, the idea of spending the rest of her life, or even the next several years, with him or anyone in general filled her with more dread and anxiety than any other worry in her young life.
She simply preferred being alone.
She didn’t mind the lonely nights in her large, empty bed. She didn’t mind having to make all of her decisions herself, and she certainly didn’t mind having to take care of herself. If anything, Haydee reveled in her unchallenged independence.
The only thing she didn’t like about it, was the lack of a chance to be a mother. That was something she’d dearly wanted to do ever since she was a little girl. She couldn’t remember ever harboring a single fantasy about a prince charming, or a fairytale wedding in her youth, but she could remember daydreaming about her children and what she would name them. Her favorite memories of childhood nearly all involved caring for or being near her younger cousins when they were babies. When she looked back on her brief engagement, not sticking it out long enough to have a child with Thomas was the only thing she regretted about it.
Even sex wasn’t of that much interest to Haydee. Sure, she had needs and urges, but even as she would find ways to fulfill those needs, she always found herself secretly fantasizing about the simple carnal act being used for its most ancient and basic purpose. When she’d been with Thomas, the only way she could routinely orgasm during their copulations was by thinking of him putting a baby in her. She even thought about it when she masturbated.
It was these fantasies, these sexualized daydreams of reproduction, that were holding her back from becoming a mother by other means. Or, that was what she’d come to theorize at least.
“Just adopt!” Several of her friends had told her over the years when she would confess to her earnest desire for motherhood.
And she really had considered it. She could easily see herself adopting a half dozen needy children from all around the world, like BrAngelina, but Haydee could never bring herself to do it.
She didn’t just want to raise children, she wanted to HAVE children.
Haydee wanted to feel that life growing inside her. She wanted to experience all the changes her body would go through, to watch her flat, toned belly swell and round as she nurtured a new person, and to see her breasts ready themselves to feed that little life.
She’d wanted it so badly that she’d even started looking into a.i. According to the doctors she’d met with, she was an excellent candidate for it, despite already being over 35. Both her own gynecologist and the doctors at the fertility clinic she’d been talking to thought she was in perfect shape physically, and said that her hormones were still perfect for those of a woman in her child-baring years. The clinic had even suggested she start looking through their donor profiles to see if she saw a donor whose DNA she’d be interested in having contributed to her future child and had her start monitoring her cycle to get a better idea of when she ovulated.
While Haydee had kept monitoring her cycle, she’d never gotten around to picking out a sperm donor.
Even though sex wasn’t particularly important to her, and she definitely didn’t want to have to deal with a partner helping her raise the child, she still kind of wanted to create the child in the natural way.
This had led her to start looking through all sorts of unsavory parts of the internet. As with anything and everything else in the world, there were plenty of websites and dating sites specifically for women who wanted to “get knocked up”. Many of the sites even offered a place for the men to specify if they were okay with not being in the picture, and some men even provided snapshots of paternity tests that allegedly proved they’d fathered other children. Haydee had quit visiting those sites very quickly though. Every time she was on them she couldn’t shake the mental image of shopping for a stud stallion, like she’d done for several of the thoroughbred race horses she owned when they got past racing age and were to be retired to the status of brood mare.
Besides, even if she looked at it that way, none of the men on the sites she saw were exactly what she’d consider “thoroughbred stud” material.
It was as she contemplated the idea of stud shopping for a higher class of human stallion one wine-tipsy night alone in her new Philadelphia townhouse that an idea occurred to her. If she wanted a high class of stud, she needed to go to where the men would be a higher class of men. Not the internet’s perverse corners, but, a place where well-off men paid to better themselves.
Though she’d sobered up by the time she got back to her home near the Hamptons, the idea had stuck. She’d told herself it was just an amusing joke, yet she still found herself digging through a stack of brochures she kept around to recommend products and experiences to clients, looking for one in particular.
“A Retreat for Health and Happiness” the cover of the brochure read overtop of a picture of a gorgeous view of a mountain lake.
The retreat was a weekend long getaway that ran once a month and cost more than two months rent on her loft. It claimed it was a full life detox over the course of a single weekend and touted everything from private yoga lessons and reiki healing to guided mediation and seminars on how to create harmony with the universe while still maintaining your edge in competitive and toxic careers. Celebrities, Wall Street wolves, Politicians, Entrepreneurs, Doctors and just about every other kind of high powered up and comer were name dropped on the testimonials page. But the thing she liked about it most were the two things that occasionally caused the elite resort to be brought into the light of controversy. Firstly, to attend, each guest had to agree to a very thorough NDA, that prohibited them from speaking about any specifics of their stay, including who they saw there, specific details about anything they participated in, or even what the resort itself looked like. The second thing was the strict, unwavering policy of perfect physical health to come to the resort. Applicants wishing to attend had to visit an approved doctor for a full medical exam. Due to certain unnamed qualities of the resort, anyone with any kind of chronic health condition, including hereditary disorders, congenital defects, or any type of contracted disease that was not or could not be fully and completely cured before their physical. The portion of the website detailing this portion was even specific down to listing any of the incurable STDs.
Acting on impulse after reading this last part thoroughly, Haydee pulled up their application and booked herself in for the last available Physical exam to attend the next retreat weekend.
