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jogging to catch up. I heard the jangle of keys in his hand.
    Since the afternoon two weeks before, when we’d met with the president of academics and the dean, Thom and I had not talked beyond the standard exchanges my research project required. I had made sure these exchanges were as curt and as professional as possible. Thom would not get the chance to tell me that things had to be different again. They were different already. This time, however, I was going to be the one who initiated the change. Thiswas the very reason I had refused Thom’s carpool offer and demanded we each drive from the university to the clinic.
    Tidbits of asphalt crunched beneath my heel as I reeled to face Thom. I shaded my eyes against the afternoon sun pricking through scattered felt-gray clouds. But more than shielding myself from the sun, I wanted to shield Thom from seeing the pain in my eyes.
    “Aren’t you worried someone’s going to see us?” My voice sounded hostile.
    Thom’s smile vanished. Taking my elbow, he said, “No, Miss Beth. I’m not worried.”
    “Where’s Meredith?”
    His grip on my arm tightened. “Work.”
    A lean, dark-haired man held the clinic door open for a shuffling pregnant woman who I assumed was his wife. As we passed, they nodded with the familiarity established through common ground. I realized we must look like another quintessential American couple: two kids and a cookie-cutter house guarded by a white picket fence and a dog.
    In the clinic, Thom stood beside the fountain until I finished signing in. We both took a seat on one of the faux leather sofas lining the left-hand wall. The corners of my eyelids began to jerk. Thom drummed his knee. What does he have to be nervous about, I wondered. If things got out of hand, despite all the legal measures taken to ensure they wouldn’t, Thom’s wife could simply withhold university donations until her husband’s job was reinstated.
    At forty-five, Meredith Fitzpatrick was the headfinancial adviser for the Catholic hospitals throughout the nation and had used the university as a convenient, tax-free catchall for her surfeit of dollars. By accepting her donations, the university had become a puppet manipulated by Meredith’s French-manicured hands. Thus Thom had become the university’s youngest tenured professor the same year Meredith wrote a check earmarked for the remodeling of Ridgeview Apartments, where I lived. And thus, when Thom and Meredith’s lawyer sent the university a confidential memo regarding the commercial surrogacy, they turned a blind eye to the fact that one of their largest donors was hiring her husband’s graduate assistant as a surrogate.
    My graduate assistantship and stipend, on the other hand, were insured only by my silence. If in a moment of weakness I failed, I would lose everything.
    Thom stopped drumming his knees. He picked up a magazine about proper prenatal and postpartum care, which I found ironic. He taught reproductive science, but I doubted he knew how to care for a child after birth. Flipping through the pages, he said, “There are things about this situation you cannot understand.”
    I looked over at him. “About the pregnancy?”
    He nodded. “I should’ve told you that day I asked you to become our surrogate.” He paused. “But I didn’t want to scare you away. I didn’t want you to say no. We had no other choice, you see. Not on such short notice. When Meredith went in for her yearly physical, the doctor discovered a benign fibroid in her uterus that had grown to suchan extent, the only way to remove it was to do a complete, radical hysterectomy. Not even her ovaries were allowed to remain. Nothing.” Thom paused to flip through the magazine. I knew he was not reading a word.
    “She and I’d always planned on having children,” he continued. “We talked about it even when she was putting me through medical school. We just wanted to wait until we had traveled some. Until our careers were more