Kenneth gently took the phone when I offered it. “We need to preserve this.”
“I know.”
“Don’t reply yet.”
“I know.”
But knowing was not the same as breathing.
I sat down slowly. My coffee had gone cold beside the filing summary. Across the desk, Dana Morales’s photo stared up at me with polite, frozen professionalism.
“Set A,” I whispered. “Kenneth, how many embryos did Connor and I have?”
He sat across from me, placing my phone carefully on the desk between us.
“According to the original clinic records we have so far,” he said, “there were two viable embryo groups documented after your last retrieval.”
I closed my eyes.
Two.
I remembered that retrieval.
The way Connor had been unusually attentive afterward, bringing me ginger tea and telling the nurse he would take excellent care of me. I had cried in the car, not from pain exactly, but from a fragile hope I was afraid to hold too tightly.
Two groups.
Two possibilities.
“What happened to them?” I asked.
Kenneth’s jaw tightened. “The records are inconsistent.”
“Inconsistent is attorney language again.”
“It means someone either made serious administrative mistakes,” he said, “or someone wanted the record to be hard to follow.”
The office seemed smaller than it had minutes before.
I stood and walked to the window because sitting made me feel trapped. Down below, hospital employees hurried through the rain with jackets over their heads and bags tucked under their arms. Everyone was going somewhere. Everyone had a door to open.
I had spent a year believing my life after Connor was a rebuilding. I had bought plants for my apartment. I had taken weekend hikes. I had learned how to sleep diagonally across a bed without apologizing for taking up space. I had become myself again in small, quiet ways.
