Chapter 7
I don't go home. Not yet.
I sit in the cryo lab for eleven minutes — I count — staring at the screen that's gone dark, the one that held the log entry that changes everything. Then I stand up, leave the room, walk down the hall, badge into the security office, and ask Marcus at the desk a question I've never asked before.
"Camera footage," I say. "How far back does it go?"
Marcus looks up from his phone. He's sixty-two, retired police, works security at the clinic because he says it keeps him out of bars. He likes me. I bring him cookies at Christmas.
"How far back you need?"
"May 3rd."
He raises an eyebrow. "That's over two months ago."
"Is it still available?"
"We keep ninety days on-site. After that it goes to the archive. You'd need Dr. Parekh's authorization for anything past ninety." He checks his watch. "May 3rd is... seventy-six days. You're good."
"The second floor hallway. Outside cryo storage."
He studies me. I can see him deciding whether to ask why. I keep my face neutral. Clinical. The face I give patients when I'm telling them something difficult — steady, warm, professional.
"Give me five minutes," he says.
* * *
The footage is grainy. Black and white. Time-stamped in the bottom right corner.
Marcus pulls it up on his monitor and angles it toward me.
The hallway outside cryo storage — a stretch of linoleum, two doors, fluorescent lighting that makes everything look institutional.
A fire extinguisher on the wall. An exit sign glowing green above the stairwell door.
He scrubs to 6:40 AM on May 3rd.
Nothing. Empty hallway. The timestamps scroll. 6:41. 6:42. 6:43.
At 6:44, a figure appears. Coming from the stairwell.
Wearing — I lean closer — dark pants, a jacket.
Hood up. Face angled away from the camera, deliberately, as if they know exactly where the lens is.
They move quickly. Not running. Walking with purpose.
Controlled. The gait of someone who has rehearsed this walk — who has pictured it, timed it, counted the steps from the stairwell to the door.
Like someone who knows where they're going because they've been here before.
They stop at the cryo lab door. Press a badge to the reader. The green light flashes. The door opens. Three seconds from stairwell to entry. Efficient. No hesitation.
"Can you zoom in?" I ask.
Marcus zooms. The image pixelates. The figure is small — shorter than me. The hood covers their hair, their profile. The badge is in their right hand, pressed flat against the reader. I can't see the badge. Can't see the face. Can't see anything that would hold up as identification.
But I can see their shoes. White sneakers with a pink stripe along the sole. Distinctive. The kind you'd notice.
I know those shoes. Jordan wore them to brunch. She wears them everywhere — her "walking shoes," she calls them. Nike with a rose-gold swoosh. I've seen them under her desk, in her car, kicked off at her front door a hundred times.
The figure enters the cryo lab at 6:44. The door closes.
Marcus scrubs forward. 6:47 — the timestamp from the access log. The sample was accessed three minutes after entry. She looked. She found it. She knew where to look.
At 6:58, the figure exits. Fourteen minutes inside. Same purposeful walk. Hood still up. Turns toward the stairwell. Gone.
"That help?" Marcus asks.
"Yes," I say. "Thank you."
I walk out of his office. My legs carry me to the break room.
I sit down in a chair that's cold from the air conditioning and I put my hands flat on the table and I press them there until I can feel the surface — the grain of it, the slight tackiness from whatever someone spilled and wiped up incompletely.
The coffee machine drips. The refrigerator hums. Somewhere down the hall, a phone rings three times and stops.
Jordan.
Jordan was in my clinic on May 3rd at 6:44 in the morning. Jordan used my badge — taken from my unlocked locker — to access the cryo storage lab. Jordan opened Tank 8. Jordan took Ryan's stored sperm sample. Jordan put my badge back. Jordan left.
And then Jordan went somewhere — maybe Nashville, maybe not — and used that sample to get pregnant.
Not a sperm donor. Not a clinic. Not anonymous.
She stole my husband's reproductive material and used it to make a baby.
* * *
I drive home on autopilot. The route is muscle memory — left on Pine, right on Broad, straight for six blocks, left into the subdivision.
The streetlights flicker on as I pass them, one after another, like a countdown.
The sun is setting — that bruised orange color that means summer is at its peak and the days are too long and there's nowhere to hide from the light.
Ryan is in the living room when I walk in. He looks up. Something crosses his face — concern, maybe, or just the recognition that I'm later than usual.
"Hey. Everything okay?"
I stand in the doorway. Look at him. This man. My husband. Who didn't cheat. Who didn't do anything except exist — exist and store a sample at a clinic three years ago because we were trying to have a baby and the doctor said it was prudent. A backup. A precaution.
"Ryan," I say. "Did you ever tell Jordan about your stored sample?"
He blinks. "What?"
"At the clinic. The sperm sample we stored during IVF. Did you ever mention it to Jordan?"
He sets down the remote. Sits up. "I... maybe? I don't remember specifically. Why would I—"
"Think. Did you tell her?"
"Chloe, what is this?"
"Just think."
He rubs his face. Three seconds of silence. "We were at dinner once. The four of us — me, you, Jordan, and Derek. Before Derek moved away. And we were talking about IVF, and I think — I think I said something about banking. About how the clinic recommends it as a backup. Is that what you mean?"
At dinner. With Jordan present. He mentioned it. She filed it away.
"When was this dinner?"
"I don't know. A year ago? Maybe more?"
A year ago. Plenty of time. Plenty of time to form a plan.
To decide. To wait for the right morning — a morning when Chloe arrives at 6:47 and leaves her badge in the break room cubby while she checks the incubators on the first floor for the twelve minutes between arrival and when she clips her badge on her coat.
Twelve minutes. That's all it would take.
Jordan knew my schedule. She's picked me up from work.
She's met me in the parking lot. She's been inside the clinic — once, for a tour, when I was proud of my lab and wanted to show her.
I showed her the cryo room. I showed her the tanks. I told her which one held our sample.
I told her.
"Chloe." Ryan is standing now. "What's going on? You're scaring me."
Three choices. I can tell him now. I can tell him everything — the dates, the log, the footage, the shoes. I can blow this open in our living room on a Friday night and watch his face do whatever a face does when it learns someone stole a piece of him.
Or I can wait.
I choose to wait. Not because I'm protecting him. Because I'm not done yet. Because I need to hear Jordan say it. I need to sit across from her and watch her lie dissolve in real time. I need her to look at me — at me, the woman she's been friends with for fourteen years — and admit what she did.
"Nothing's going on," I say. "I'm just tired. Long day."
He watches me for a beat too long. Then nods. "I'll heat up leftovers."
"Okay."
He goes to the kitchen. I sit on the couch. Pick up a throw pillow. Press my fingers into the seam.
The baby is Ryan's. Not because he slept with her. Because she took him — a piece of him, the part of him that was supposed to be ours, the possibility we froze in a tank because we still believed it might happen someday.
She took our maybe. And turned it into her yes.
* * *
At midnight, I'm in bed. Ryan is asleep. I'm not.
My phone is on the nightstand. I pick it up. Open my messages. Find Jordan's thread. The last text — a heart emoji she sent after the ultrasound. A red heart. Casual. Easy.
I stare at it for a long time.
Then I scroll up. Past months of messages. Past the brunch plans and the "how are you" checks and the memes and the voice notes. All the way back to May.
May 3rd. 7:15 AM.
Jordan: Morning! Want to grab coffee later? I'm near your side of town.
She texted me thirty minutes after she left my clinic. After she stole my husband's sample. She texted me about coffee. Casual. Normal. As if she hadn't just committed a crime in my workplace using my credentials.
I set the phone down. Tap the nightstand.
And I lie there in the dark, calculating.
Not a due date this time. Not crown-rump length or gestational age or follicle count.
I'm calculating what to do next. How to approach her. What to say. How to make her tell me the truth without the truth destroying something I'm not ready to destroy.
Except I think it's already destroyed. I think Jordan destroyed it on May 3rd at 6:44 in the morning, in white sneakers with a pink stripe, walking down a hallway she had no right to be in, holding a badge that wasn't hers, opening a tank that held something that belonged to me and Ryan and no one else.
Three things I know for certain:
Jordan is pregnant with my husband's baby.
Jordan stole the sample that made it possible.
And tomorrow, I'm going to make her tell me why.