I decline, since nerves are already playing havoc with my bladder, and take the seat she’s offering me. She sits down behind her desk and folds her hands and smiles at me. It’s a professional smile, but warm. My eyes drift to the photograph frame on her desk, a large silver one, turned away from me with its velvet back showing. I imagine the family portrait inside. A husband, or perhaps a wife. Children, one or two or even three. Chestnut-haired, maybe, like the doctor. I imagine one smiling, another one sulking, fat cheeks pouched in an adorable frown.

“So.” The doctor rests her hands on the desk and seeks my eyes. “Tell me about what brings you here today.”

I know she doesn’t need the obvious answer.

She doesn’t need me to tell her why I, and all the other anxious women out there in that room, showed up today. She wants to hear about me, and suddenly it feels like a long time since anyone has wanted to hear that, or since I’ve been looked at with such quiet, patient focus.

I feel it all well up in me. All the words, all the feelings. I have an urge to pour everything out in this little office with its generic wall art and bland beige furniture.

My sister’s gone AWOL.

My husband’s unreachable.

My nephew’s lonely.

I miss my father.

But none of that is the reason I’m here today. None of that has anything to do with the fact that the mere glimpse of a toddler-sized anything—tiny gloves abandoned in the park; miniature gumboots stacked on a porch—fills me with a loss I can’t explain. Or the fact that I’ve switched pharmacies because the one nearest to me now has moved its greeting card rack to right in front of the sliding doors, and the ambush of pastel blues and pinks is sometimes too much to deal with.

I take a breath. A beat passes. The doctor pushes a box of tissues my way.

Her eyes meet mine.

“Take your time,” she says.

Chapter Twelve

Chapter Twelve

Dr. Tremain has statistics for everything, and she doesn’t get defensive when I ask hard questions. If Oliver were here right now, she could convince him, I tell myself.

I look through the brochures she’s placed in front of me. Bar graphs, numbers, statistical probabilities for different age ranges. Indicators, but no guarantees. Like everything in life, it seems the answers boil down to it depends.

The doctor asks me about my family history, and I tell her about Mom struggling to conceive and then having two pregnancies almost back to back when she was in her mid-thirties. The doctor raises her eyebrows.

“Unusual. But I take it you don’t feel comfortable relying on something similar.”