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established, until we were more financially stable.” He laughed. Behind his glasses, his eyes remained somber. “But the years passed, and that ‘one day when’ never came. Meredith’s surgery was our wake-up call. We thought our dream of having children was over. Then I started thinking: Meredith was already on a low-dose contraceptive, so if she started taking Lupron to regulate her pituitary gland and shut down her ovaries, she could begin intramuscular injections to stimulate the growth of follicles on her ovaries.”
    “Controlled ovarian hyperstimulation,” I said.
    Thom nodded. “Within two months, the doctor could still give Meredith the complete hysterectomy needed. But while removing her ovaries, he could simply harvest her eggs.”
    “You just needed a recipient,” I said, and then glanced over at the fountain, embarrassed by my candor. This was his wife’s reproductive system we were discussing, not a case study in a book.
    “Yes,” Thom said. “We could harvest the eggs, but after Meredith’s hysterectomy, we’d have no womb to plant them in. That’s when the truth came out: All these years later,Meredith still wanted to focus on her career. Still wanted to travel more. She still wanted to focus on her life and not on a child who would have to become her life.” Thom flipped another page. I wished he would stop the pretense. I wished he would look at me. A woman with a pin-striped skirt and glossy claret heels was called back. Thom draped the magazine across his lap. He did not look at me. “I am the one who made it all happen,” he said. “ I am the one who contacted you . . . the doctors, the lawyers, as I knew that if it did not happen now, it never would.”
    “Bethany Winslow?”
    I glanced up, and the nurse’s scanning dark eyes met mine. She smiled and I nodded; Thom and I stood. She asked my birth date at the door and led us through the narrow peach corridor over to a small carpeted room with a scale and a chair. It felt both uncomfortable and intimate to have Thom watching me stand in my stocking feet on the scale. He must have felt as strange as I, for though there was not much to be seen, he kept peering around the room. Every once in a while, his eyes would flick back to my stomach, and then up at my face. I wondered if he hadn’t let himself believe what was happening until now. I hadn’t let myself believe it either.
    “First-time parents?” the nurse asked, pulling the Velcro cuff apart with a dry rasp.
    Thom nodded, and I shook my head. There was no easy way to define our relationship. This being a fertility clinic, the nurse must have seen other complicated scenarios. She did not ask any more questions. She just took myblood pressure, then led us to a room that was pale-blue and square with one oblong window facing the west side. Cutaway diagrams of the female anatomy in the three trimesters of gestation were the only art gracing the walls. A model of the reproductive system sat on a Formica countertop next to a deep, stainless steel sink.
    “Dr. Hancock will be right with you,” the nurse said before pulling the door.
    The room echoed with quiet; it felt like the two of us were trapped inside a tomb. I leaned back against the examination table, and the paper covering it crackled. Thom strode the tiled space in between the table and the wall.
    “Would you like to take the chair?” I asked. His frenetic movements were making me more nervous than I already was.
    Shaking his head, he laced his arms behind his back. “You’re sure you don’t mind me being here?”
    “Thom, it’s your child.”
    He stopped moving, then came back to face me   —mere inches away. Behind his glasses, I could see the blue starbursts in his green eyes, the brown freckle dotting the left. “It is my child, isn’t it?” he said.
    I feared he was going to cry. I did not know how I could comfort Thom when I had promised myself that I would not reach out to him again.
    Dr. Hancock,