Chapter 4
I wait three days.
Three days of normal. Three days of going to work, checking incubators, assessing embryo grades, sitting across from women who look at me like I'm holding the keys to their future.
Three days of watching cells divide under the microscope and thinking: biology doesn't lie.
Biology is the only honest thing in this building.
Three days of coming home and watching Ryan cook or not cook, talk or not talk, exist in the same rooms as me the way we've existed for fourteen months — present but careful.
Like two people sharing a house after a flood.
Everything functional. Nothing quite the same.
On Friday, I tell him I'm working late. I'm not.
I know his password — our anniversary followed by my middle name. He's never changed it. My hands tremor through two mistyped attempts before the inbox opens.
I type "Nashville" into the search bar.
Fourteen results. Hotel confirmation — the Marriott, June 3rd through 6th, one guest, king bed. Flight itinerary. Conference registration. All exactly where they should be.
I search "Jordan." Zero results. Her last name. Zero. Her phone number. Zero. Her email. Zero.
Nothing connecting him to Jordan. Or he's not stupid enough to use email.
I close the laptop. Sit in the dark parking lot with the engine off. The security light above me buzzes — an orange halo in the summer dusk. A moth hits the lamp. Again. Again. Something trying to get close to a thing that will only burn it.
I think about what I know and what I don't know.
What I know: Jordan was in Nashville on June 4th. Ryan was in Nashville June 3-6. Jordan says the baby came from a sperm donor at a Nashville clinic. The baby was conceived in early June based on the LMP she wrote on a form at brunch (May 2nd plus average cycle).
What I don't know: whether the Nashville timeline actually matters. Whether I'm connecting dots that aren't connected. Whether the June 4th Instagram post and the June 3-6 conference are coincidence or evidence.
What I need: the ultrasound. The dating scan will give me crown-rump length. CRL will give me gestational age within three days. Gestational age will give me conception date. And conception date will tell me whether Nashville is even in the window.
If it's not — if the scan dates conception to May instead of June — then I've been chasing ghosts.
Then Nashville is irrelevant. Then Jordan really did use a donor at a clinic in a city that happens to be the same city my husband visited three weeks later for a conference. Coincidence. End of story.
I need to be at that ultrasound.
I call Mara. It rings three times.
"Hey babe! What's up?"
"Nothing. Just — thinking about Jordan. The whole donor thing. Did she ever mention it to you before brunch? Like, planning it?"
"She told me the day before. Swore me to secrecy." Mara laughs. "Which lasted exactly twelve hours."
"Did she say which clinic? In Nashville?"
"Nope. Just that she wanted to go somewhere nobody knew her. Which I totally get — imagine running into your sperm donor at Whole Foods."
"Yeah." I force a laugh. "Hey — do you remember when she went to visit her sister in June? Did she seem different after?"
"Different how?"
"I don't know. Just — anything."
Mara is quiet for a second. "Actually — yeah. I tried to text her that weekend and she went dark for like two days. Which is NOT Jordan. Then she hit me back with 'sorry, bad signal at Rachel's.' But Rachel's in Memphis. Memphis has signal."
"That's weird."
"Right? I figured she was doing some digital detox thing. Or, like, having a crisis about turning thirty-five." Mara pauses. "Why? Is everything okay?"
"Yeah. Just — you know me. I overthink."
"Girl. Take a bath. Stop spiraling."
"You're right. Love you."
"Love you."
I hang up. Two days dark in early June. In "Memphis." Where the signal is fine.
* * *
Saturday morning. Ryan sleeps until nine. I've been awake since five — staring at the ceiling.
When he gets up, he finds me in the kitchen already dressed. Coffee made, the machine done gurgling fifteen minutes ago.
"You're up early," he says. Scratching his jaw. Eyes half-closed.
"Couldn't sleep."
"Anxiety?"
He asks this casually. Like it's weather. And maybe it is — maybe my anxiety has become so much background noise in this marriage that it doesn't warrant anything more than a one-word check-in.
"A little."
"Want me to make eggs?"
"Sure."
He cracks three eggs into a bowl. Whisks them. Pours them into the pan with that practiced flick of the wrist. I watch his hands. The same hands that used to give me injections — progesterone, Menopur, Gonal-F. He'd ice the spot first. Count to three before the needle. Hold pressure after.
"Ryan."
"Mm."
"That Nashville conference in June. How was it?"
He doesn't pause. Doesn't flinch. Just stirs the eggs and says, "Fine. Boring. The keynote was about AI in sales forecasting or something. Why?"
"Just thinking about it. You came back sunburned."
"Yeah, the rooftop bar at the hotel. We went up there after the sessions." He plates the eggs. Sets them in front of me. "What's this about?"
"Nothing. Just remembered."
He sits across from me. Eats. Looks at his phone between bites — scrolling something, sports probably. His face is open, relaxed, unguarded in the way that only happens in the morning before the day builds its walls around him.
If he slept with Jordan in Nashville, he's either a sociopath or an extraordinary actor. Because this man — eating eggs, scrolling his phone, asking me about anxiety like it's the weather — does not look like a man carrying a secret that weighs what this secret would weigh.
But.
But I've sat across from couples in the clinic who held hands and smiled at each other and picked baby names, and one of them was lying about something — the sperm count they didn't actually get tested, the previous abortion they never mentioned, the affair that produced a child they're now passing off as their partner's.
People lie in the most intimate rooms. People lie while making eye contact.
I know this because I've seen the paperwork that contradicts the performance.
"Did you see anyone from here at the conference?" I ask.
"Jake from the Denver office. Maria from Atlanta. The usual." He looks up. "Why are you asking about Nashville?"
"I'm not asking about Nashville. I'm just — making conversation."
He studies me for a moment. Then: "Okay."
And we eat in silence. The eggs are good — soft, slightly underdone, the way I like them.
He remembered. After fourteen months of quiet, after the grief and the distance and the careful choreography of two people avoiding their own sadness, he still knows how I like my eggs.
That means something. I'm not sure what.
* * *
Sunday. I can't do this anymore — the circling. The quiet calculation. The looking at my husband's face for evidence of something I can't name. I need information that isn't ambiguous. I need data.
I need Jordan's medical records.
The thought arrives and I feel it land in my body like a weight being placed on a scale. I know what this is. I know it's wrong. I know it's a HIPAA violation. I know it could end my career, my license, everything I've built.
But Jordan doesn't go to our clinic. She goes to — I don't know where she goes.
She's never needed fertility services. She's one of those women who probably got pregnant the first try.
Maybe she doesn't even have an OB yet at twelve weeks.
Some women wait until fourteen or sixteen to establish care.
This isn't the path. Medical records aren't the path.
The path is simpler.
Monday morning. I'm in the lab. Devi is running the centrifuge. The hum fills the room — that low steady frequency that means separation is happening, heavy from light, usable from unusable.
"Devi."
"Mm."
"If someone accessed cryostorage, would there be a log?"
She looks up. Not alarmed — curious. Devi is never alarmed. It's one of the things I value most about her. The entire building could be on fire and she'd make sure the specimens were secured before she walked out.
"Everything's logged. Badge-in time, tank accessed, specimen ID. It's all in the system." She tilts her head. "Why?"
"I just want to check something."
"Check what?"
I don't answer. She watches me for a long moment, then turns back to the centrifuge.
"You know I won't judge you," she says to the machine. "Whatever it is."
I know she won't. That's not what stops me.
What stops me is that once I look, I can't un-look.
Once I pull the data, the data exists as fact rather than suspicion.
Right now, this is still a story I'm telling myself — a narrative built on dates and distances and a coffee cup logo.
If I access the cryo logs, this becomes real.
I'm not ready for real. Not yet.
But the knowledge that the logs exist — that access is tracked, that every time someone opens a tank it's recorded with a timestamp and a badge number — this stays with me. A door I now know is there. Locked, but I have the key.
* * *
Tuesday night. Jordan calls.
"I have my next ultrasound on Thursday," she says. "Thirteen weeks. The NT scan."
"Good. That's the nuchal translucency measurement. They'll check for—"
"I know what it checks for, Dr. Whitmore." She's laughing. "I googled it."
"Sorry. Occupational hazard."
"Will you come? To the appointment?"
I close my eyes. "Jordan, I don't think—"
"Please. Tyler has a work thing he can't move. And I don't want to go alone. What if something's wrong?"
"Nothing will be wrong. Your twelve-week scan was perfect."
"But what if."
The way she says it — small, scared, honest. This is my best friend.
This is the woman who drove two hours to sit with me after my chemical pregnancy, who didn't say anything, just sat on the bathroom floor while I bled and cried.
Who brought me three pints of ice cream and didn't mention it when I ate all of them.
"I'll come," I say.
"Thank you. Thursday at 10. The women's center on Park Ave."
"I'll be there."
I hang up. Stare at my phone. Thursday at ten. An ultrasound. Thirteen weeks.
And here's what my brain does next, because it can't help itself, because this is what six years of embryology has done to me:
If I see that scan, I can estimate crown-rump length. If I get the CRL, I can calculate gestational age to within three days. If I know the gestational age to within three days, I can pinpoint the conception date.
Not approximately. Not "early June." An actual date. A date I can then cross-reference against airline records and hotel check-ins and Instagram posts of coffee cups from shops on 5th Avenue, Nashville.
One ultrasound. One measurement. And I'll know.
I hang up. Stare at my phone. The screen reflects my face back — distorted, small, unrecognizable.
I've calculated 847 due dates for strangers. I never thought I'd calculate one to find out who my husband slept with.
The sentence arrives whole. Complete. Like a lab result printing: clean, final, undeniable. I stare at my phone until the screen goes dark. Then I plug it in. Set it on the nightstand.
Tomorrow I'll know.