Barb puts her hand on Marley’s. “She’s fine, dear. Just couldn’t make it, so she sent us. She’s not doing that work anymore.”
Marley shrugs. “I knew it was a long shot.”
She stands. Barb stands too. I’m not ready to move, not until I can understand the unease that’s rising like acid. Marley was an egg donor. Regina recruited her on Gabe’s behalf. As the embryologist, Aram must have prepared her eggs for storage or implantation. It’s all an essential part of the field. The burning creeps up my throat. I want to retch, only there’s nothing solid, nothing coherent to purge. Just the persistent inkling that something isn’t right.
Marley stares down at me, and I wiggle to the side so she can retrieve her sarong. “When are you due?”
“Next week.” I mean my C-section is scheduled for then. I don’t elaborate. It takes all my energy to emit those two words.
“Say congrats to Dr. Irons for me.” Her well-wishes send a jolt up my spine.
Barb and I watch Marley walk away, her slender, curvaceous body getting smaller as the distance between us grows. I can’t shake the suspicion that I know her, that she’s the younger sister of one of my friends, a teacher at the nursery school we toured for Jasper, a waitress at Great White.
“It’s uncanny,” Barb says. “She could be Laila Ruiz’s little sister.”
That’s it—why Marley is familiar. Laila Ruiz’s face is everywhere from movie billboards to perfume ads, even in her mid-forties. When she got pregnant last year, I knew.It was you, wasn’t it?I asked Gabe. He’d smirked, admitted nothing, but anyone in their forties who wants to get pregnant and has the means goes to Gabe. He gets impossible results. Maybe they aren’t so impossible after all.
Laila Ruiz must have used Marley’s egg. It’s not surprising that she would keep this secret. Plenty of celebrities use donated eggs without divulging it to the press. The public doesn’t deserve this information. Sure, it creates a false sense of fertility. If Laila Ruiz can get pregnant at forty-five, you can too. As her doctor, despite any misgivings he may have had, Gabe would have honored her privacy. Only, it isn’t merely privacy. It’s secrecy. The extra office space. The donor recruiting. Regina’s connection to my son. This is bigger than Laila Ruiz, bigger than mothers who don’t want to broadcast their fertility struggles to the world. And it couldn’t all be to hide an affair.
Regina’s connection to my son.
I grab Barb’s leg like I might collapse, even though I’m still sitting. I let go of Barb and roll onto my side, trying to make myself so small I’ll disappear. Only my stomach is too obstructive, too hard, too full of life. My head spins. This time it isn’t from low blood pressure. It’s from an impossible truth starting to take shape in the form of my son.
Chapter Twenty-Eight
Barb
Tessa lies on the sand, legs curled up, cradling her belly. I fight the urge to lie down beside her, to wrap my arms around her.
With one aggressive rocking motion, Tessa lunges up and stumbles across the beach toward the parking lot. I trot to keep pace. She doesn’t hear me shout over the wind, asking her what’s going on. Her blond hair is a tornado around her head, making her seem crazed. She isn’t crazed. She’s a mother, determined.
I climb into her car, and Tessa is already backing out of the spot before I have my seat belt on. My rental car grows smaller in the rearview as we barrel out of the parking lot. I’ll have to come back to get it. I can’t think about that now.
I brace my hands against the dashboard as she slams the brake, then grasp the handle above the door as she speeds up again.
“Tessa, slow down.” It’s like she can’t hear me.
By the time she pulls up to the curb, I feel like I’ve been in a rowboat on the open sea. She leans over me to read the numbers on buildings I don’t recognize.
“Tessa, stop. Tell me what’s going on.”
From Marley’s story, I gather she was Gabe’s patient. A donor, whom my daughter recruited. I don’t see why that’s sinister enough to put Tessa on edge, to have gotten Regina killed.
Tessa pulls a U-turn that sends me flying into her shoulder, then swings into a parking lot I recognize. She thunders out of the car, half running, half waddling up to the coffee shop on the far corner of the shopping center. Then she scampers in the opposite direction, scans the numbers on the buildings until she stops in front of Rosebud.
She tries the door, thwarted by its lock, then attempts to peer in, but the glass is opaque. A line of sweat outlines her spine along the back of her dress. I approach her cautiously. When I place my hand on her shoulder, it’s soaked.
“I need to see. I need to know,” she says into the door.
“Know what?”
Then she gazes right at me. “If he’s mine.”
Her words send a chill through me. Before I know it, Tessa grabs a loose brick from the side wall at the end of the strip mall, holds it above her head as she charges toward the door.
“Tessa, stop.” I take a step back to avoid getting hit with glass shards when she throws the brick into the frosted glass. Around us, cars drive by, oblivious or indifferent to what’s happening.
The glass shatters. Momentarily, Tessa pauses, stunned by what she’s done. An alarm blares inside. Glass crunches beneath her sandals as she walks through the cavity of the broken door.
