Chương 7
Kirsten felt anger and something worse moving together.
Recognition.
Not forgiveness. Not sympathy exactly. Recognition of a mother’s terror, even in the woman who had created it through theft.
“Why didn’t you use your own egg?” Kirsten asked.
Melinda looked away.
That was the first time Kirsten saw shame replace fear.
“I couldn’t,” she said.
The words were barely audible.
“What?”
“I had premature ovarian failure. I found out when I was twenty-eight.”
Kirsten searched her face.
They had been best friends for eleven years. They had shared apartments, clothes, illnesses, funerals, passwords, and one disastrous vacation in which Melinda lost both passports in a beach bar. Kirsten had told her every detail of fertility treatment. Melinda had listened, held ice packs against Kirsten’s abdomen, complained about clinic parking, and never once said she was infertile too.
“You never told me.”
“You were the one who was supposed to be broken.”
Kirsten’s breath stopped.
Melinda covered her mouth. “I didn’t mean it like that.”
“You did.”
“I mean—you were honest about it. Everyone knew. People were careful with you. I didn’t want that face.”
“What face?”
“The face people make when they decide your life is sad.”
Kirsten understood that too, and hated her for making understanding possible.
Melinda wiped her cheeks. “I told myself the embryo was half Connor’s. I told myself you had signed the settlement and stopped treatment. I told myself you would never know.”
“You told yourself I had abandoned something after you helped steal it.”
“Yes.”
The direct answer struck harder than denial.
Dana began walking toward them.
Kirsten opened her car door.
“Does Connor know any of this?” she asked.
“No.”
“Did he sign the transfer form?”
“No.”
“Did he ever suspect?”
Melinda hesitated. “Not until I was pregnant and the dates didn’t fit perfectly. I told him my cycles were irregular.”
“And he accepted that?”
“He wanted to.”
Dana reached them. “That is enough.”
Kirsten got into her car.
Melinda caught the edge of the door before she could close it.
“Please don’t take him away in one day.”
Kirsten looked at her hand.
Melinda released the door.
“I’m asking for time,” she said.
“You had three years to give me the truth.”
Kirsten closed the door and drove away.
She made it four blocks before pulling into a grocery store parking lot.
There, between a delivery truck and a cart return, she screamed.
Not loudly. The sound seemed to collapse in her chest and come out as a dry, broken breath. She struck the steering wheel once with the heel of her hand, then again. On the third attempt she missed and hit the horn.
A woman loading cereal into the back of a minivan looked over.
Kirsten lowered her forehead to the steering wheel and began laughing. She laughed because she had honked during the destruction of her life. She laughed until it turned into sobbing, then stopped when the crying became painful.
After several minutes, she sat up and noticed a shopping cart rolling slowly across the wet parking lot. It bumped the curb and stayed there.
She called Asha.
Her friend answered on the first ring.
“I’m in a grocery store parking lot,” Kirsten said.
“Which one?”
“I don’t know.”
“Look at the sign.”
Kirsten looked. “Meyer’s.”
“The one on Grant?”
“There are two?”
“There are four. Send me your location.”
“I don’t need rescue.”
“Then I’ll come annoy you.”
Twenty minutes later, Asha climbed into the passenger seat carrying two paper cups and a bag of powdered donuts.
“You hate powdered donuts,” Kirsten said.
“They were out of the good ones.”
“You could have bought nothing.”
Asha opened the bag. “That kind of thinking is why you’re on administrative leave.”
Kirsten told her what Melinda had said.
Asha listened without interruption until Kirsten reached the sentence about premature ovarian failure.
Then she swore softly and wiped powdered sugar from her black trousers.
“She sat through your injections,” Asha said.
“Yes.”
“She came to the fundraiser after the second retrieval.”
“Yes.”
“She gave that speech about chosen sisters.”
“Yes.”
Asha stared through the windshield. “I always thought that speech was too long.”
Kirsten almost smiled.
“What are you going to do?” Asha asked.
“I don’t know.”
“You always know.”
“Apparently that has been irritating people for years.”
“Irritating and useful are not opposites.”
Kirsten picked at the cardboard seam of her coffee cup. “He is genetically mine.”
Asha waited.
“I hate saying it like that. It sounds like ownership.”
“It sounds like biology.”
“He knows her voice. He reaches for her.”
“Also true.”
“I want him.”
The words came out before Kirsten had decided to speak them.
Asha looked at her.
Kirsten’s throat tightened. “I saw him once. I don’t know him. I don’t know what he eats or how he sleeps. But I want him, and that makes me feel monstrous.”
“No.”
“I want the court to tell her she has no right to him.”
“That part is a little monstrous.”
Kirsten turned toward her.
Asha held up one powdered finger. “You are allowed ugly feelings. You are not allowed to confuse them with instructions.”
Kirsten looked away.
Asha’s voice softened. “Wanting him does not make you cruel. What you do with that wanting might.”
The genetic results arrived six days later.
The probability that Connor was Caleb’s biological father exceeded 99.99 percent.
The probability that Kirsten was his biological mother exceeded 99.99 percent.
Kenneth read the numbers aloud in his conference room because Kirsten could not make herself look at the page.
Connor sat at the opposite end of the table. He had lost weight. His beige jackets were gone, replaced by a dark sweater with one sleeve pushed higher than the other. Martin sat beside him with a yellow legal pad.
May you like
Melinda did not attend. Dana appeared by video and confirmed receipt of the report.
Simone Ellis spoke last. “My concern is maintaining stability for Caleb while the adults and the court determine legal parentage and responsibility. No unilateral removal. No disruption of medical care. No public statements about the child.”
