“Yes.”

“I have a good feeling, honey. I have a really, really good feeling.”

“So do I,” she murmured, and really, she did. Even with all the terrible things happening in Africa and Europe and now New York, a calm positivity engulfed her at the thought of this, her last chance to be pregnant. Good things could still happen in this tumultuous world. Over the years, they’d been through all the things: an endless, tantalizing, unfulfilled wait on an adoption list on the one hand; on the other, pelvic exams, ultrasounds, labs, invasive tests to assess whether Hannah’s fallopian tubes were blocked, and even a scraping of her uterine lining to assess the expression of various growth factors. Harry had gotten off easy, but he’d had to contend with at least one humiliating test of his own. The end result of all that evaluation had been exactly nothing. No one could explain why Hannah could not conceive.

Next had come the interventions. “The REI said we could have IUI or IVF,” Hannah’d told Harry one evening at dinner after the initial workup had yielded nothing but frustration and a horrific credit card bill.

“IUIRIVF?” inquired Harry. “Are we aiming to give birth to a government agency?” He slid his reading glasses back up his nose and offered her a wry look at the utilization of yet more medical acronyms. If you threw around enough gross terminology, he’d complained, no one would ever get pregnant, because hideous images of menstrual cycle diagrams and gonads would insert themselves into one’s consciousness at precisely the worst moment and the entire process would screech to a halt. No man could be expected to complete the act necessary for creating a baby after being subjected to a bunch of talk about gonads.

This, of course, was not a novel complaint; anyone who’d ever been through the process of an infertility ordeal knew the whole experience was about as sexy as a genital wart. But you had to admit: the use of an acronym was preferable to trying to pronounce the word hysterosalpingogram, even for a doctor. “You’re one to talk, Harry,” Hannah pointed out in a reasonable tone. “The military might be the only entity using more acronyms than the medical field.”

“Ours are funny, though. And they’re not as gross.”

She thought she had him on this one. “Really? Name one funny military acronym. I mean a real one, not one you guys invented.”

“MANPADS,” said Harry promptly. “PMS.”

“Which are?”

“Man-portable air-defense system and professor of military science. We’ve also got FARPs. Forward area refueling points. FARPs are funny. And those are just some official ones; you’re right about the ones the guys invent—they’re hilarious and clever and a perfect example of American dominance. Nobody makes up funnier shit than American military personnel.”

“We have made-up funny acronyms too,” said Hannah, “but sometimes they’re a bit unkind to the patients, so I don’t use them.”