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“Maybe I’ll find out that things aren’t so bad. You know me—morose Matthew.” He forced a smile. “Try not to worry, okay?”

Chapter 4
    Lisa watched intently as Charlie McCallister, his eyes fixed on the lenses of a heated microscope, guided the needle containing a single sperm into the ovum in the petri dish. The clinic used this relatively new procedure when the sperm count was low or the sperm had low motility. (“Lazy swimmers,” Matthew called them.) Typically, doctors didn’t oversee lab technicians, but Lisa had promised the husband and wife, a particularly anxious couple, that she would observe the micro manipulation
    “Bull’s eye.” The red-haired lab director covered the petri dish, already labeled with the patient’s name, and took the dish to one of the dull gray, boxlike incubators at the far end of the lab.
    “What’s next?” Lisa asked when he returned a moment later carrying test tubes.
    “The Chapman eggs.”
    Early this morning Lisa had aspirated thirteen eggs from Susan Chapman. Of the eggs that would be fertilized and developed into viable embryos, a maximum of four would be implanted to increase Susan’s chance of sustaining a clinical pregnancy. The others would be cry-op reserved—frozen—and stored for a later date. “Let’s make some babies,” the lab director said.
    Lisa smiled. She’d witnessed in vitro fertilization hundreds of times; though the process was simple, the concept never failed to amaze and excite her. She watched as Charlie transferred the first egg from the sterile test tube into a petri dish labeled with Susan’s name. Then he added Jason Chapman’s “washed” sperm and affixed another label with Jason’s name.
    “Any bets on how many will take, Charlie?”
    “I only bet at the track. Doc. And thirteen isn’t exactly anyone’s favorite number.” He grinned, then turned to the tall, blond-haired man who had just entered the lab. “What about you, Norman? Any bets on how many of these little critters will be sending Mother’s Day cards?”
    “I think you know I’m not a betting man.” A brief smile flitted across the man’s serious, angular face. “But I’m reasonably certain every one of these will develop into embryos. If I may say so. Dr. McCallister, you have a gift.”
    “A paid political announcement.” Charlie’s face had turned red, disguising the freckles splashed across his nose and cheeks.
    “Hardly. Norman’s right, you know.” Lisa smiled warmly. “Your track record’s pretty damn good.” She caught Norman Weld’s darting look of disapproval and remembered that Charlie had told her the lab assistant was a little straitlaced.
    Charlie was transferring an egg from another test tube into a new petri dish when Lisa’s pager beeped. It was Selena.
    “You’d better come up here quick, mi hija,” the office manager said urgently when Lisa contacted her. “There are so many hysterical women demanding to see Dr. Gordon, I barely made it to my desk.”
    Lisa frowned. “What do you mean, ‘hysterical women’?”
    “They’re not making sense. Reporters are here, too. With cameras. I don’t know what’s going on.”
    Tossing her green, sterile paper gown, cap, and booties into a cardboard box at the entrance to the lab. Lisa raced up the wide flight of stairs to the ground floor. Though Selena had warned her, she was startled to see the long,
    narrow hall crowded with people who seemed to be talking at once.
    “Dr. Brockman? Is it true what they’re saying?”
    Turning, she saw Diane Clerman. “Is what true?”
    Yesterday Diane had been euphoric, effusive in her gratitude. Now Lisa heard anger and panic in her unnaturally high-pitched voice. Within seconds she was surrounded by more than two dozen men and women, several of whom were her patients and their husbands, and by two men and a woman who elbowed their way around the others and snapped her picture.
    The media photographers. “What’s going on?” Lisa