THEY ARE SHOWN into a tiny, dimly lit side room. She is told to take off her clothes from the waist down and given a gown to wear.

The room is dark except for small recessed lights set in the wall. There is a nurse. A doctor. Her on the gurney. Her feet in stirrups. The monitor beside her. Her heart. Her heart. Nathan’s hand, steady on her arm. The embryologist appears. “Ms. Grey? Mr. Blake?”

She nods.

“Well, the thirteen eggs that were taken four days ago have been watched closely. There were seven still developing last night.”

She nods.

“There are three that look viable. One is excellent. A 3.5. The others are a 2.5 and a 2.”

“And the others?” asks Nathan.

“Less viable. Our recommendation is to transfer the top two.”

“Yes,” says Nathan. “Of course.”

The ceiling has small pinpricks of light, like stars.

“Han?”

“Shall we proceed?” says the voice of the doctor.

“Yes.”

She lies back, gasps at the chill of metal as a speculum is inserted. There is a deep strange almost-pain as her cervix is stretched wide.

“Now, just watch the screen.”

Nathan grasps her hand.

“There we are,” the doctor says. “There they go.”

Two points of light appear in the darkness of her womb.

She looks at them.

“Here,” the doctor says kindly, reaching down and tearing off a printout. “Would you like this to take with you?”

“Thank you.” Hannah stares down at the photograph, at those two smeared points of light. She looks. She looks and looks and looks.

Resistance

1998

CATE PUTS HER FULL STOP ON HER FINAL FINALS PAPER (GREEK Myth in Spenser’s Epithalamion) and steps out into the mild May sun, where she is duly pelted with flour and rice by a small cluster of waiting friends, with whom she drinks a bottle of champagne in the cobbled street. Then she goes to the pub and drinks pints of beer in the beer garden until the ground is tipping, and gets sick in the restroom.

The next morning she wakes up late and sits and stares at the wall, which is peppered with Post-it notes, quotes by Spenser, Rochester, Congreve, Donne. She takes them down one by one and puts them in the trash. She has to be out of this room on Monday. It is over. She has limped to the finish line, patched up on Prozac, pills she has been taking since the end of her second year, when, quite suddenly, standing in the college quad, her mind began to fracture. Grief, was what the college counselor said to her. Delayed grief, agreed the doctor, writing out his prescription. And of course, he went on, Oxford can be very stressful in itself.

She took a year off. Went back to Manchester. Stayed in her father’s house.