Come Over | EP 2

**Clayton Echard** (0:01)
I got an e-mail from Laura. The e-mail said, Urgent. I opened the e-mail, and she's like, I'm pregnant. And it had a positive pregnancy test embedded in the e-mail. And now I'm seeing proof of something. I just remember thinking, oh, fuck.

**Stephanie Young** (0:23)
About 11 days earlier, former bachelor Clayton Echard hung out with a woman named Laura Owens. They hooked up. But here's the thing.

**Clayton Echard** (0:33)
We never slept together. We never had sex.

**Stephanie Young** (0:38)
When Clayton received that e-mail from Laura saying she was pregnant by him, he was in disbelief. He didn't believe the photo of the test could be real. So he invited Laura to his apartment again.

**Clayton Echard** (0:50)
The reason I invited her over was to get her to take a pregnancy test right in front of me.

**Stephanie Young** (0:56)
Laura agreed to come over, but she was a step ahead. She'd already e-mailed Clayton the photo, but she brought the positive pregnancy test with her to show him in person. It was one of those at-home tests where one line means not pregnant and two lines means pregnant. On the test Laura brought, Clayton could see...

**Clayton Echard** (1:15)
One very, very present line and the other one was like slightly there.

**Stephanie Young** (1:21)
Clayton did not see that coming.

**Clayton Echard** (1:23)
Well, I was having a hard time believing it because we didn't have sex, so I wanted her to take a test in front of me so that I could see with my own eyes.

**Stephanie Young** (1:33)
Clayton told Laura he'd already purchased a test of his own and asked her if she'd mind taking a second test.

**Clayton Echard** (1:40)
I figured once I pulled out that surprised pregnancy test, she would decline to take it, that that would be the end of it all. But unfortunately, that's not what happened.

**Stephanie Young** (1:51)
When he asked her to take the second test...

**Clayton Echard** (1:53)
She was like, OK, yeah, I'll do it.

**Stephanie Young** (1:57)
Laura went into the bathroom, took the test, and for the next few minutes, all Clayton could do was wait for the truth to come to light.

**Clayton Echard** (2:05)
It was a torturous five minutes that felt like an eternity because I knew that a line either was or was not going to appear. And that singular line would dictate the outcome of my life.

**Stephanie Young** (2:25)
I'm Stephanie Young, and this is Love Trapped. We're going to go back to The Night in Question, the night when Laura Owens came over to Clayton's apartment for a hookup. Clayton didn't know it at the time, but that night would change his life forever. It would set off a chain of events that would lead to a criminal investigation, and it would lead me, a curious podcaster, to Clayton Echard's door. Hi Clayton, it's good to see you again.

**Clayton Echard** (3:19)
Hey Steph, it's good to see you. So I should probably tell you how I got here, right?

**Stephanie Young** (3:27)
Let's go back to May of 2023
Clayton wasn't in a good place at the time. He was despised by Bachelor Nation and what felt like the entire internet. He also had just met up with his ex, Susie Evans. He met her on The Bachelor. They dated for almost a year after they filmed the show, but eventually broke things off. Clayton was still torn up about it.

**Clayton Echard** (3:50)
And I thought, man, maybe this was a mistake to break up. Maybe in another world, if we didn't experience all this pain, we could have made it work.

**Stephanie Young** (3:58)
We've all been there, right? You see your ex, and you suddenly start wondering if breaking up was a mistake.

**Clayton Echard** (4:04)
I was struggling, and I remember I was crying my eyes out.

**Stephanie Young** (4:09)
This wasn't just any breakup. Clayton and Susie had announced their split on a joint Instagram post a few months earlier. Nearly 100,000 people liked this post.

**Clayton Echard** (4:20)
I definitely remember just the hate, the vitriol that people had for me.

**Stephanie Young** (4:26)
The comment section was particularly brutal.

**Clayton Echard** (4:29)
I remember reading comments like, oh, this man got to have his cake and eat it too after everything he did. He didn't have to suffer at all. Susie deserves so much better than this guy, this monster, this mess, this loser. I mean, I saw all of it. It was like as if she was dating the worst man alive.

**Stephanie Young** (4:49)
Clayton had taken a hard fall from Grace and was adjusting to his new life as a real estate agent in Scottsdale, Arizona. There, he was a big fish in a small pond, but his experience on The Bachelor left him feeling hollow.