“I’ll see you in an hour or two, Sam, okay?” I say. “Thanks for bearing with me.”

He extracts himself reluctantly from the car, and I try not to feel like a horrible person as I watch him move slowly up the path towards Dinah’s door.

“Thank you!” I signal to her. When the front door closes I turn the car around, and fifteen minutes later I’m in the parking lot outside the clinic. I turn off the engine and take some long, deep breaths. And then some more long, deep breaths.

Behind me, the traffic lights change and an engine guns.

Get in there, Gillian. Before you lose your nerve.

I get out of my car and slam the door.

*

The reception desk is long and white and sleek—this whole place feels a little like being inside an iPhone. I give my name quietly to the young woman behind the desk, who smiles and invites me to have a seat.

“Dr. Tremain won’t be long.”

I eyeball the other people here as discreetly as I can. I get the sense we might all be eyeballing each other, actually. Most of the folks here are women waiting alone, although some have partners with them—male partners, female partners. A few are reading books or magazines, and the rest have their heads buried in their phones, swiping and scrolling with absorbed frowns on their faces. Or maybe they’re not absorbed at all; maybe they’re just trying to pretend to themselves and to everybody else that this is all no big deal.

I wonder how long these people have been trying for a baby? Are some here for the first time, like me? Have others been coming here for years, trying and failing, watching their money get swallowed by this sinkhole of hope?

My palms grow damp and I clamp them over my knees.

I start scrolling through my phone like the two women next to me, mostly to numb my anxious thoughts, and see an email from Dennis. I open it. He’s letting me know he’s hired a PI.

“Gillian Gerritsen?”

I blink. A woman is calling me over to the doorway, and smiles quickly as I approach.

“Dr. Tremain,” she introduces herself as she leads me down a warren of corridors and glass-paneled offices. She’s wearing smart, tailored clothing, not a white coat or scrubs. She’s probably a few years older than me, and sleeker. She looks like the kind of woman who probably “does it all” and still somehow has free time in her day, but it makes me want to trust her instead of dislike her.

She opens a door into one of the offices and wheels a seat out from the desk for me.

“Water?”