He Forced Me To Abort Now He Begs Me Back Chapter 10
My lawyer sent the settlement agreement that same day, with a draft of the defamation complaint attached.
Less than three hours later, Natalie’s lawyer replied.
They were willing to increase their monetary offer on one condition: we had to remove the public clarification and pinned-post requirement.
My lawyer turned her laptop toward me. “She’s offering eighty thousand dollars, plus she’ll cover all your legal fees.”
I barely glanced at the number.
“Tell them my emotional distress isn’t for sale. I don’t want money. I want the truth.”
I pushed the agreement back across the table.
“They have forty-eight hours. If they don’t agree, we’ll see them in court. And when that happens, the chat logs, emails, and all those secretly recorded videos become public record.”
My lawyer nodded and sent the message exactly as I’d said it.
The next two days passed in silence.
Near the end of the forty-eighth hour, I was at my apartment organizing prenatal paperwork when my lawyer called.
“Natalie agreed. To every single term. Not a word changed.”
She paused, then added, “Her lawyer warned her that once discovery started, we’d have the right to subpoena every text, email, and fundraiser backend record between her and Evan. And then it wouldn’t just be one clarification going public.”
I looked out the window, unsurprised.
Natalie wasn’t admitting fault because she felt remorse.
She had simply realized that the cost of fighting would be far higher.
Under the agreement, she had to post the clarification at two p.m. the next day.
I went to my lawyer’s office ahead of time.
At 1:59, my lawyer opened Natalie’s Instagram page. I sat beside her and watched the time in the corner of the screen tick over to 2:00.
Refresh.
The long statement we had drafted appeared at the top of her page, pinned.
Natalie admitted that she had qualified for the next stage of the donor evaluation but had voluntarily withdrawn for her own family-planning reasons. She admitted that Evan had known all along. She admitted that they had publicly announced I would terminate my pregnancy without my consent. And she admitted that she had posted the edited video, allowed the harassment to continue, and was now publicly apologizing to me.
Word for word.
Within minutes, the comments were flooded with thousands of responses.
“So you’ve been pressuring the stepmother to sacrifice herself this whole time?”
“The biological mother wouldn’t donate, but she wanted a pregnant woman to have an abortion?”
“Evan knew, too? You two used a sick child to manipulate everyone!”
A few minutes earlier, she had been “a mother fighting for her son.”
Now, all that remained was a tidal wave of outrage.
My phone rang.
Evan.
I looked at the screen, then declined the call.
“Thank you,” I said to my lawyer.
“You won this yourself.”
I got up and left without refreshing the page again.
When I pushed open the law office doors, the afternoon sun hit my face. I took a deep breath, and the weight that had been pressing on my chest for so long finally lifted.
My phone buzzed again.
I didn’t take it out. I just zipped up my coat and walked straight into the light.