My phone buzzed. A notification I almost ignored until I saw the caller ID.
Dr. Beaumont.
I stared at it for three seconds before answering.
“Dr. Beaumont.”
“Mr. Landry, I wanted to call you personally with the results. The egg retrieval was successful. We fertilized twelve eggs. Ten are developing normally. We’ll monitor them over the next five days and select the strongest candidates for transfer.”
Twelve eggs. Ten developing.
That meant two had failed already.
“What are the odds?” I asked.
“With her age and health? Sixty to seventy percent success rate on first transfer.”
Sixty to seventy percent.
Which meant thirty to forty percent chance of failure.
I’d built an empire on worse odds. I’d walked into situations with less than a fifty-fifty shot and came out on top. I’d calculated risk my entire life—weighed the cost of a move against the potential gain, decided what was worth the blood and what wasn’t.
But this wasn’t business.
This was biology.
This was something I couldn’t buy my way out of, couldn’t intimidate into submission, couldn’t control through sheer force of will.
“How long until we know?” I asked.
“Five days. We’ll monitor the embryos’ development and call you with an update. If everything progresses as expected, we’ll schedule the transfer for day five or day six.”
Five days.
One hundred and twenty hours of not knowing. Of waiting. Of having no control over whether this worked or didn’t.
“Thank you, Dr. Beaumont.”
“You’re welcome. I’ll be in touch.”
She hung up.
I sat there in the silence of my office, the city glittering below me, and felt something I hadn’t felt in years.
Helplessness.
I’d spent my entire life building walls against it. Against the idea that there was anything in this world I couldn’t bend to my will. That there was any outcome I couldn’t engineer through intelligence, resources, or ruthlessness.
But I couldn’t engineer this.
I couldn’t make Truth’s body cooperate. Couldn’t make the embryos develop faster or stronger. Couldn’t control whether the transfer would take or whether it would fail.
Sixty to seventy percent.
Those were good odds. Better than most people got.
But they weren’t certainty.
