Chương 3
This time she could not make the words come.
She carried the bag back upstairs.
Melinda’s attorney arrived twenty-eight minutes later. Her name was Dana Chu, and she entered the conference room in navy slacks and a rain-darkened coat, speaking before she had fully removed it.
“No statements,” she said. “No documents opened. No recording devices.”
Connor gave a humorless laugh. “You’ve rehearsed this.”
Dana set her leather case beside Melinda’s chair. “Mr. Fleming, I do not represent you.”
“You knew too?”
“I know what my client has told me.”
“And what exactly has she told you?”
Dana looked at Melinda. “We’re leaving.”
Kenneth remained seated. “A preservation notice was delivered to Northlake Reproductive Medicine at nine this morning. We have also requested that the court prevent destruction or alteration of all related records. Leaving will not change that.”
Dana’s gaze moved to the sealed folder. “What do you believe you have?”
“A transfer document recovered from off-site archival storage, along with a laboratory inventory discrepancy and a billing entry.”
Melinda made a small sound.
Connor heard it. “You said the clinic was wrong about the dates.”
Dana put a hand on the back of Melinda’s chair. “Do not answer.”
He turned toward Kirsten. “What did they tell you?”
Kirsten placed the diaper bag on the table and removed a clean bottle, formula container, and a small packet of crackers. She set them in front of Melinda.
Connor watched her do it. “What did they tell you, Kirsten?”
“That the storage tank alarm failed overnight. That three embryos were compromised. That ours was one of them.”
“Our embryo,” he repeated. “The one from your last retrieval.”
“Yes.”
“The one they said had stopped developing.”
“They said it could not be used.”
Connor looked at the baby again.
The child had worked two fingers into his mouth. He seemed sleepy now, his head resting against Melinda’s chest.
Connor sat down without choosing a chair so much as falling into the nearest one. “We were still married.”
Kirsten’s restraint slipped.
“You were sleeping with my best friend, but yes, on paper we were still married.”
Melinda flinched.
Connor looked at the table. “I didn’t know about that until after the clinic called.”
“Does the timing improve it?”
“No.”
The answer came without defense. It unsettled her more than an argument would have.
Dana opened the diaper bag and began preparing the bottle, perhaps because it gave her hands useful work. “My client will cooperate with lawful requests. She will not be interrogated in a hospital.”
Kenneth nodded. “That is reasonable.”
Connor looked at him. “Reasonable?”
“It is the law.”
“My son may have been—” He stopped, unable to choose a verb.
Created had happened years ago. Stolen sounded impossible in a room where the stolen thing was alive and chewing on his sleeve. Transferred was clinical enough to hide inside.
Kirsten supplied nothing.
Dana handed the bottle to Melinda. The child drank immediately, one hand pressing against the clear plastic.
Kenneth folded his hands. “Mr. Fleming, you need independent counsel. Dr. Sinclair’s interests may conflict with yours.”
Connor looked at Kirsten. “Do they?”
“I don’t know what my interests are yet.”
“Is that true?”
Her eyes went to the baby.
“Yes.”
Dana gathered her case. Melinda stood, adjusting the child against her hip.
Connor rose. “You’re not taking him.”
The room changed.
Melinda froze. Dana stepped between them—not dramatically, just enough to make the boundary visible.
Connor’s voice dropped. “Until I know what you did, you’re not walking out with him.”
“You have no authority to detain my client or her child,” Dana said.
“He is my child.”
“And under the current legal record, hers.”
Connor looked at Kirsten, apparently expecting her to correct the injustice of that sentence.
She could not.
Kenneth stood. “No one is removing the baby from his primary caregiver in a conference room. We will seek appropriate orders through the court.”
Melinda began to cry then, but not in the way Connor had expected Kirsten to cry downstairs. Her face did not crumple. Tears moved silently over skin that had gone nearly colorless.
“Please,” she said. “He needs his nap.”
Kirsten moved aside from the door.
Melinda carried the baby past her. For one second, the child looked over Melinda’s shoulder directly into Kirsten’s face. The lifted eyebrow appeared again.
Then he was gone.
Connor remained standing until the latch clicked.
“What happens now?” he asked.
Kenneth placed one hand on the sealed folder.
“Now,” he said, “everyone stops pretending this is only a family dispute.”
Three years earlier, Kirsten had been standing in an operating room when the fertility clinic called to tell her the embryo was gone.
She had not answered because she was reducing a fracture in the arm of a seven-year-old boy who had fallen from a backyard trampoline. The boy’s mother stood outside the room, crying into both hands. Kirsten remembered the child’s green socks, one of them twisted at the heel. She remembered the anesthesiologist asking whether she wanted music and choosing none because she needed to think.
The clinic left a voicemail.
By the time Kirsten listened to it, Connor had already received the same call. He was sitting in his car in the hospital garage, engine running, forehead against the steering wheel. She found him there after midnight.
The loss had been delivered in phrases designed to avoid liability: unexpected tank fluctuation, loss of viability, internal review, profound regret. Their one remaining embryo had been created after two surgeries, four retrieval cycles, and a year in which Kirsten’s body seemed to exist mostly as a site for needles. It had been tested, frozen, and postponed while she recovered from complications of endometriosis.
She had called it their comma.
May you like
Not an ending. A pause before the sentence continued.
Connor had held her in the garage. His face had been wet, and for several minutes she believed grief had returned them to each other. Later she would learn he had spent that afternoon at Melinda’s apartment.
