Finally, I said, “How long have you suspected?”
Kenneth exhaled. “The financial issue? Months. The embryo release? Only recently. The connection to the child became plausible this morning.”
“Plausible.”
“I won’t use stronger language until testing confirms it.”
“Attorney language.”
“Protective language.”
I leaned back, exhausted. “What happens if it’s true?”
He folded his hands. “Then we deal with a difficult legal and emotional situation very carefully.”
“That sounds like something you say when the actual answer is terrible.”
“The actual answer is complicated,” he said. “You may have claims related to fraud, emotional damages, and consent violations. Parentage is more delicate. Courts focus heavily on the child’s stability.”
“Good.”
Kenneth looked at me.
“I mean it,” I said. “Whatever Connor did, Elliot didn’t do it. I don’t want him turned into evidence with a bedtime routine.”
Something like respect moved through Kenneth’s face.
“That will matter,” he said.
“Will it?”
“Yes. Not always quickly. Not always enough. But it will.”
I rubbed my eyes. “I spent years thinking I couldn’t have a child. Now I may have one who calls someone else mother.”
Kenneth was quiet.
There was no comforting answer.
I appreciated that he did not invent one.
After a moment, he opened another folder.
“This is what I wanted to discuss privately.”
The third-party involvement.
Dana.
He slid a photo across the desk.
It was a grainy image from what looked like a professional directory. A woman in her late forties, dark hair cut to her chin, silver glasses, polite smile.
My stomach tightened.
“Dana Morales,” Kenneth said. “Former administrative coordinator at the fertility clinic. She left shortly after the merger.”
“I remember her.”
“She currently works as an independent patient advocate.”
“Is that legal?”
“Yes, if done properly. But she also appears to have a small consulting company. Connor’s business paid that company twenty-five thousand dollars around the same time the release documents were processed.”
I stared at the photo.
Lavender perfume.
Silver glasses.
A kind voice on the phone.
Mrs. Fleming, I know this process is hard. We’ll take good care of everything.
I had believed her.
“Why would she do it?” I asked.
“Money, perhaps. Loyalty to Connor. Pressure. We don’t know.”
I picked up the photo.
Something about her eyes made memory stir again.
“She knew me,” I said.
Kenneth frowned. “From the clinic.”
“No.” I shook my head slowly. “Before that.”
He waited.
I searched through years of faces. Hospital fundraisers. Medical school events. Fertility seminars. Charity panels. Waiting rooms. Conference badges.
Then it came to me.
“My mother,” I whispered.
Kenneth leaned forward. “What about her?”
“Dana worked for my mother’s oncologist years ago. Not as a nurse. Front desk, maybe billing. I remember because she sent flowers after my mother died.” I looked up. “Why would she later work at my fertility clinic?”
Kenneth’s expression changed.
Not dramatically.
Enough.
“That may be coincidence,” he said.
“But you don’t think it is.”
“I think we need to verify timelines.”
My office felt colder.
I looked at the rain-streaked window.
My mother had died six years before Connor and I started fertility treatments. She had never known how hard we tried. Never sat with me through failed cycles. Never told me whether hope was worth the pain.
But Dana had been there, somewhere at the edges of both losses.
“Could she have had access to my old medical information?” I asked.
“Possibly limited information, depending on her role. But old oncology office records would not explain fertility clinic documents.”
“No,” I said. “But it means she recognized me.”
Kenneth nodded slowly. “That is possible.”
My phone buzzed.
A message appeared from an unknown number.
For a moment, I thought it might be Melinda.
It wasn’t.
The text contained no greeting.
Just a photograph.
I opened it with stiff fingers.
It showed a storage room. Metal tanks. Labels. A gloved hand holding a small white tag close enough for the printed words to be read.
FLEMING/SINCLAIR – EMBRYO SET B
Below the photo was one sentence.
Ask Connor what happened to Set A.
I stopped breathing.
Kenneth stood. “Kirsten?”
I turned the phone toward him.
He read the message once.
Then again.
The rain tapped steadily against the glass behind us.
Set B.
My voice barely rose above a whisper.
“Kenneth… how many embryos were there?”
He did not answer immediately.
And in that silence, I understood something worse than betrayal had been waiting beneath the first secret.
There had been more than one missing future.
PART 3
For a long moment, the rain was the only sound in my office.
It tapped against the window in thin, silver lines, steady and patient, while the message on my phone seemed to burn through the screen.
Ask Connor what happened to Set A.
Kenneth did not reach for the phone right away. He simply stood there, reading the words as if the space between them mattered as much as the message itself.
I could hear the hospital around us. A cart rolling somewhere down the corridor. A soft page over the speaker system. A child laughing in the distance, high and bright, unaware that the world could split open inside one small office.
“Kirsten,” Kenneth said carefully, “do you recognize this number?”
I shook my head.
My thumb hovered over the screen, but I did not type. My hands, the hands that could start an IV in a moving emergency bay and steady a panicked parent with one touch, suddenly felt disconnected from me.
Set B.
There had been enough grief in believing there were no embryos left. Enough pain in thinking every possible future had ended behind clinic doors and failed phone calls.
But this message suggested something else.
Not just theft.
A system.
A sequence.
Set A. Set B.
More than one hidden truth.
Kenneth gently took the phone when I offered it. “We need to preserve this.”
“I know.”
“Don’t reply yet.”
“I know.”
But knowing was not the same as breathing.
I sat down slowly. My coffee had gone cold beside the filing summary. Across the desk, Dana Morales’s photo stared up at me with polite, frozen professionalism.
“Set A,” I whispered. “Kenneth, how many embryos did Connor and I have?”
He sat across from me, placing my phone carefully on the desk between us.
“According to the original clinic records we have so far,” he said, “there were two viable embryo groups documented after your last retrieval.”
I closed my eyes.
Two.
I remembered that retrieval.
The way Connor had been unusually attentive afterward, bringing me ginger tea and telling the nurse he would take excellent care of me. I had cried in the car, not from pain exactly, but from a fragile hope I was afraid to hold too tightly.
Two groups.
Two possibilities.
“What happened to them?” I asked.
Kenneth’s jaw tightened. “The records are inconsistent.”
“Inconsistent is attorney language again.”
“It means someone either made serious administrative mistakes,” he said, “or someone wanted the record to be hard to follow.”
The office seemed smaller than it had minutes before.
I stood and walked to the window because sitting made me feel trapped. Down below, hospital employees hurried through the rain with jackets over their heads and bags tucked under their arms. Everyone was going somewhere. Everyone had a door to open.
I had spent a year believing my life after Connor was a rebuilding. I had bought plants for my apartment. I had taken weekend hikes. I had learned how to sleep diagonally across a bed without apologizing for taking up space. I had become myself again in small, quiet ways.
