I hadn’t been back to that clinic in over a year. You do not go back to places where you sat in paper gowns and waited for results that turned out to be the wrong results, where you learned, over and over across the span of years, that your body was going to require negotiation. Some spaces accumulate a specific kind of memory, the kind that lives in your chest rather than your mind, and you simply stop entering them unless you have to.
I had to. My attorney needed the transfer documentation from the clinic’s records department, and picking it up in person was faster than waiting for the mail. So on a Tuesday afternoon I was sitting in the fertility clinic waiting room with a folder in my lap, doing what waiting rooms require of you, which is mostly deciding where to put your eyes.
I had chosen a spot on the middle distance, the soft blur of the fish tank in the corner, when I heard heels crossing the tile toward me. I knew those heels before I looked up. Patricia Parker had a way of moving that communicated she was arriving somewhere she was owed.
She was sixty-one, immaculate, wearing the expression she always wore when she had spotted someone she believed had something to answer for. She looked me over from head to toe in the slow, deliberate way of someone making a point. “Well,” she said, with the particular satisfaction of a woman who has been carrying a sentence for a year and has finally found the right moment to deliver it.
“I heard you were still alone.”
I closed the folder in my lap. “Hello, Patricia.”
Her smile widened. “You know, leaving you was probably the smartest decision Ryan ever made.
Look at him now. A beautiful daughter with Megan. A real family.” She paused, letting the word real do the work she had built the sentence around.
“Something you could never give him.”
The words landed where she had aimed them. They always did. Patricia was precise.
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