Chương 3
Then it meant too many things at once.
"What?"
Her hands tightened over each other.
"Three weeks after you left."
I stood so abruptly that the folder fell again.
This time I let it stay on the floor.
"An embryo."
"Marcus."
"Our embryo?"
Her face had gone pale.
"Yes."
The anger that came through me was so clean and immediate that I almost welcomed it.
Years earlier, after surgeries and injections and losses we had eventually stopped discussing because discussing them hurt more than silence, we had stored two embryos at the fertility clinic.
They belonged to a version of us I believed we had buried.
"You used one after I left?"
Alina rose slowly.
"I was already in the treatment cycle."
"You used our embryo while we were separating?"
"I tried to tell you."
"You needed my consent."
"I had it."
"No."
"You signed the forms."
"Years ago."
"The authorization was still valid."
I stared at her.
She looked frightened now, but she did not retreat.
"Which embryo is this baby from?"
Her lips parted.
"The transfer didn't take."
The anger stopped as abruptly as it had begun.
I could hear the fluorescent lights humming above us.
"What?"
"The embryo didn't implant."
She pressed her hand over her stomach.
"This pregnancy happened before the transfer."
February seventeenth.
The leaking sink.
Thai food.
The bottle of wine.
Her hand on my chest.
Me leaving before she could finish a sentence.
I looked at the child moving beneath her coat and finally understood why my wife had answered the simplest question in the world with the word probably.
"Then why don't you know for sure?"
Alina's eyes filled, though the tears did not fall.
"Because the clinic called me six weeks ago."
She looked toward the closed courtroom door.
"They found a problem with the records."
Alina watched my face as if she could see the sentence arranging itself into the worst possible shape.
"What kind of problem?"
"The clinic said there had been a documentation error involving several stored embryos."
"Documentation error?"
"That's how they phrased it."
"What does that mean?"
"They're still investigating."
I stared at her stomach again.
The hallway suddenly felt too public for what was happening, though nothing about the people passing us had changed.
A lawyer in a navy suit walked by carrying two coffees.
A woman near the elevators whispered furiously into her phone.
Somebody's printer kept spitting out pages behind a half-open office door.
I lowered my voice.
"Are you telling me they might have transferred someone else's embryo into you?"
"No."
"Then what are you telling me?"
"They aren't sure which embryo they thawed."
I felt my jaw tighten.
"They transferred one."
"Yes."
"It failed."
"That's what I was told."
"And now they aren't sure it was ours?"
"Correct."
"So what does that have to do with the baby?"
Alina rubbed the side of her thumb with one finger, the way she used to when she was trying not to snap at me.
"Because they asked me to come in for genetic testing."
I said nothing.
She continued.
"They said the dates made natural conception more likely, but because my first blood test after the transfer showed rising hormone levels, there was a question about whether the transfer had actually failed when they originally thought it did."
The words arrived one by one, medical and careful, but the meaning underneath them was brutal.
"So there are two possibilities."
"Yes."
"Either we conceived naturally that night."
"Yes."
"Or the transfer worked."
"Yes."
"And if the transfer worked, nobody knows whose embryo they gave you."
Her eyes went wet again.
"That's what they're trying to determine."
I bent down and picked up the folder because I suddenly needed it in my hands.
My fingers trembled enough that I had trouble getting the loose papers back inside.
"Six weeks ago."
She nodded.
"You've known this for six weeks."
"I've known there was a question for six weeks."
"And you didn't tell me."
"I didn't know how."
"You call me."
"I know."
"You call me and say, Marcus, I am pregnant and there is a chance this child is ours, and by the way the fertility clinic may have screwed up so badly that nobody knows whose embryo was transferred."
Her face tightened.
"I know what I should have done."
"Apparently not."
"Don't do that."
"Do what?"
"Talk to me like I enjoyed this."
I laughed again, but this time there was no humor in it.
"You had six weeks."
"And you had months."
That stopped me.
She looked away almost immediately, as though she regretted saying it.
I did not need to ask what she meant.
Months of ignored calls.
Months of attorneys.
Months of letting practical anger stand in for everything I did not want to examine.
The courthouse door opened again.
The clerk leaned out.
"Mr. and Mrs. Reed?"
Neither of us answered fast enough.
She glanced between us.
"Your attorneys are asking whether you're coming in."
"My attorney isn't here," I said.
"She's inside."
That surprised me.
My lawyer, Dana Whitcomb, had told me she might be delayed by another hearing.
Apparently she had arrived without my noticing.
Alina touched my sleeve.
"We need to ask for the continuance."
I looked at her hand until she removed it.
"Does your lawyer know?"
"Some of it."
"Which part?"
"That I'm pregnant."
"Does she know the paternity is uncertain?"
Alina hesitated.
"Not exactly."
"Jesus."
The clerk took one careful step backward.
When the door closed, I turned to Alina.
"You came here planning to postpone the divorce without telling anyone why?"
"I was going to tell the judge there were changed circumstances."
"Changed circumstances."
"I didn't know what else to call it."
"A baby is not a circumstance."
"I am aware of that."
"You don't sound like it."
May you like
Her eyes hardened.
"And you don't get to show up after seven months of silence and suddenly act like you've been robbed of some perfect fatherhood experience."
