Chapter 11
I've been sitting in this chair a hundred times — for staff meetings, case reviews, the annual performance evaluation where she tells me my lab numbers are excellent and asks if I'm interested in the research director track.
This is the first time I've sat here with my hands knotted in my lap and a prepared statement rehearsed in my head like a patient explaining symptoms.
Dr. Parekh is sixty-one. Silver hair, sharp glasses, the kind of posture that says she's been sitting across from people delivering difficult news for three decades and nothing surprises her anymore.
I tell her everything.
Not the emotional parts. Not Jordan's face or Ryan's bathroom or my weeks of spiral. I tell her the data: the access log, the badge discrepancy, the timestamp, the security footage, the confession. I lay it out the way I'd present a lab anomaly — sequential, factual, stripped of the soft tissue.
She doesn't interrupt. She writes notes on a yellow legal pad — small, angular handwriting that I can't read from across the desk. When I finish, she sets her pen down and removes her glasses. Rubs the bridge of her nose with her thumb and forefinger.
"Chloe," she says. "I need to ask you directly. Did you provide your badge to this individual?"
"No."
"Did you provide your access credentials, your login, or any other means of entering the cryo facility to anyone outside of authorized staff?"
"No."
"Were you aware at any time prior to discovering the access log that your badge had been used without your authorization?"
"No."
Three questions. Three answers. I feel like I'm being deposed. I am being deposed — this is the preliminary version, the internal one, before it becomes external. Before compliance and legal and possibly law enforcement.
Dr. Parekh puts her glasses back on. "I want to be clear about what happens next.
We have a mandatory reporting obligation.
Unauthorized access to cryopreserved specimens is a category-one security breach.
I'm required to notify the clinic director, our compliance officer, and our legal counsel. Today."
"I understand."
"There will be an investigation. You'll be interviewed formally — by our compliance team first, then potentially by law enforcement. Your badge access will be temporarily restricted — that's protocol, not punishment. You'll be placed on administrative leave pending the investigation's findings."
Administrative leave. I hear the words and they settle into me like anesthesia — numbness spreading outward from a central point.
I knew this was coming. Devi warned me. The system protects itself first. The system doesn't care that I'm the victim — the system sees my badge in the log and the system responds.
"How long?"
"Standard is two to four weeks. If the first-floor access log confirms your location at the time of the breach — and I expect it will — the restriction will be lifted quickly. But in the interim, I can't have you in the lab."
"I understand."
"Chloe." Her voice changes. Drops from administrator to something closer to — not quite maternal.
But human. The glasses come off again. She holds them in both hands, loosely, like something she doesn't need anymore.
"I've worked with you for six years. Your record is impeccable.
Your lab numbers are consistently in the top quartile nationally.
I want you to know that I believe you. What I'm describing is process, not judgment. "
I nod. My throat is tight. "Thank you."
"Is there anything else I should know? Anything that might come up during the investigation that you want me to hear from you first?"
I think about the security footage I asked Marcus to pull. That I viewed without authorization from Dr. Parekh. That I probably shouldn't have accessed.
"I viewed the security footage from the second-floor hallway on May 3rd," I say. "I asked Marcus. Before I came to you."
She writes it down. Doesn't react. "That was premature, but understandable given the circumstances. I'll note it."
"And the individual — Jordan Reeves. She's my — she was my best friend. She's aware that I know. She confessed verbally in the presence of a witness. Devi Krishnamurthy, our lab technician."
"I'll need to speak with Devi as well."
"She's expecting that."
Dr. Parekh stands. I stand. She walks me to the door and does something she's never done — she puts her hand on my shoulder. Briefly. A pressure that says: I see you. This is terrible. You did the right thing.
"Go home," she says. "I'll call you when the investigation timeline is established."
I walk out of her office. Down the hall.
Past the lab — my lab, where forty-something embryos are dividing without me, where someone else will check the incubators at 6:47 tomorrow morning.
Past the break room where my locker sits open, my badge still inside.
Past Devi, who is standing at the centrifuge and catches my eye as I pass.
She doesn't say anything. She just nods. One small dip of the chin. I know. It's done. Good.
I walk out of the building and into the parking lot and the July morning hits me — already 85 degrees at eight-thirty, the asphalt radiating heat, my car a black shape in the far row where I always park. Three rows back, fourth spot from the end.
I sit in my car with the engine off. The steering wheel is too hot to touch. I wait for it to cool. Three minutes.
Then I drive home to an empty house and a temporary life.
* * *
The administrative leave lasts eleven days. I run. I clean obsessively. I throw away the IVF sharps container from the hall closet — empty, clean, but still there. It makes a hollow sound in the trash can.
Day three, my mother calls.
"You sound thin," she says.
"I'm fine, Mom."
"Ryan called your father. Said things were complicated."
"He shouldn't have done that."
"What's happening? Is it the baby thing again?"
The baby thing. Like three years of IVF was a hobby.
"It's something else. I can't explain yet. But I'm handling it."
"You always say that. You handle everything alone and then you fall apart alone and nobody gets to help." A pause. "Let me come up."
"No. Mom — I need to do this myself."
"Promise me you're eating."
"Devi makes sure of it."
"The Tamil girl? Good. At least someone has sense." She sighs. "I'm calling tomorrow."
"I know."
"And the day after."
"I know."
"I love you, Chloe Marie."
"Love you too."
I hang up. Stand in my kitchen. The house ticks around me — refrigerator, clock, the settling of walls in July heat. But the conversation helped. Something about my mother's voice — the firmness of it, the refusal to let me disappear into silence — broke a seal I didn't know was building.
Ryan and I exist in a strange new territory. Not fighting. But present in a way we haven't been in over a year.
On day six, he says: "I've been thinking about the baby."
I'm washing dishes. My hands still in the soapy water.
"I don't know what I feel," he says. "One minute I'm furious. And then the next minute I think — there's a kid coming in February. With my genes. And I didn't choose it but it's still—" He stops. Rubs his face.
"You're explaining it fine."
"I want to be angry and nothing else. But I can't make it just evidence."
"Ryan. Whatever you feel about that child — it's yours to feel. I won't judge you for it."
"But it's — Chloe, it's the baby we couldn't have. That's what kills me. It's the baby that was supposed to be ours. And she just — she just took it. The chance was ours and she—"
His voice breaks. He puts his forehead on the table.
His shoulders move. I stand at the sink and I watch my husband grieve and rage simultaneously and I think: this is what Jordan took from both of us.
Not just genetic material. Not just a sample in a tank.
She took the narrative. The story we were supposed to write together — or not write, together.
The decision that was OURS. Whether to try again.
Whether to move on. Whether to use that sample someday or let it go. She stole the choice.
I cross the kitchen. Stand behind him. Put my hands on his shoulders. Three squeezes.
"I know," I say. "I know."
* * *
Day nine. Devi calls.
"They interviewed me today," she says. I can hear her apartment in the background — the building sounds, the dry cleaner's rhythmic thump. "Standard questions. Where was I on May 3rd, did I notice anything unusual, what's my badge protocol."
"And?"
"I told them the truth. That you were on the first floor at 6:47 every single morning like clockwork and that your badge lives in an unlocked cubby that anyone could access during early morning hours when the building is open but the staff is thin."
"Thank you."
"Don't thank me. I just described reality." A pause. The sound of her pouring something — water, or chai. "They also asked about Jordan. Whether I'd ever seen her in the building."
"Had you?"
"Once. In March. She came to pick you up for lunch. I remembered because she brought you flowers — which I thought was sweet at the time and now feels like reconnaissance."
Reconnaissance. The word lands hard. Like a specimen dropped on tile — the sound of something breaking that can't be put back.
Jordan in March. Visiting. Bringing flowers.
Smiling. Hugging me in the parking lot. And all the while — looking.
Learning. Seeing the layout. The locker room.
The stairwell. The second floor. The distance between the cubbies and the cryo lab door.
Counting steps the way I count embryos. Three, three, three.
"She planned it," I say. Unnecessarily. We both know she planned it.
"Of course she planned it. The hood. The 6:44 entry — before anyone else is on the second floor.
The fourteen-minute window. She timed it against your routine.
She knew you'd be on the first floor at exactly that time because you told her.
Because she's been to the clinic. Because she brought you flowers in March and walked through the building with her eyes open.
" Devi's voice is flat. Factual. The voice she uses when she's reading lab results she doesn't like.
"This wasn't impulse. This was months of watching and learning and waiting. "
I sit with that. The weight of it. Fourteen years of friendship and somewhere in those fourteen years — maybe in the last one, maybe in the last six months — Jordan shifted from friend to something else. From someone who knew me to someone who studied me. Who learned my patterns and used them.
"Chloe," Devi says.
"Yeah."
"It's almost over. The investigation. They have the log, the footage, my statement, your statement. They know it wasn't you."
"I know."
"Come back to the lab. I'm tired of checking your incubators."
I almost smile. Almost. "Soon."
"Also — I made too much rasam tonight. There's a container with your name on it in the clinic fridge."
"Devi. I'm on administrative leave. I can't come get rasam."
"Then I'll bring it to you. Eleven PM. Don't be asleep."
She hangs up before I can argue.
At 11:04 PM, my doorbell rings. Devi stands on my porch in sweatpants and flip-flops, holding a container of rasam and a small steel cup. Her car is still running behind her — headlights cutting across the lawn.
"For your stomach," she says. "You've lost weight. I can tell from your voice. Don't ask me how."
I take it. She doesn't come in. Just stands there for a moment in the porch light with moths circling above her head and the smell of night-blooming jasmine from the neighbor's yard drifting between us.
"Three more days," she says. "Maybe less. Then you're back."
"Three more days."
"The incubators miss you. They told me. They were very specific."
"Incubators don't talk, Devi."
"They talk to me. I'm good with machines." She shoves her hands in her pockets. Rocks back on her flip-flops. "Eat it while it's hot. Reheat ruins the pepper balance."
She nods. Turns. Walks to her car. I watch her drive away. Then I go inside, heat the rasam, and drink it standing at the kitchen counter at 11:09 PM in July, and it burns going down in the way that means someone made it with too much pepper because that's how Devi makes everything — with force.
It's the best thing I've tasted in weeks.