PART 3
For a long moment, the rain was the only sound in my office.
It tapped against the window in thin, silver lines, steady and patient, while the message on my phone seemed to burn through the screen.
Ask Connor what happened to Set A.
Kenneth did not reach for the phone right away. He simply stood there, reading the words as if the space between them mattered as much as the message itself.
I could hear the hospital around us. A cart rolling somewhere down the corridor. A soft page over the speaker system. A child laughing in the distance, high and bright, unaware that the world could split open inside one small office.
“Kirsten,” Kenneth said carefully, “do you recognize this number?”
I shook my head.
My thumb hovered over the screen, but I did not type. My hands, the hands that could start an IV in a moving emergency bay and steady a panicked parent with one touch, suddenly felt disconnected from me.
Set B.
There had been enough grief in believing there were no embryos left. Enough pain in thinking every possible future had ended behind clinic doors and failed phone calls.
But this message suggested something else.
Not just theft.
A system.
A sequence.
Set A. Set B.
More than one hidden truth.
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.
