CHAPTER FORTY

KRISTEN

I peer through the nursery window at Virginia Mason Hospital and look at my sister’s latest arrival. It’s a boy. Her fourth. He’s beautiful, of course. All babies are. He’s got a mop of dark hair that is actually brushable. She hasn’t decided the name. She’s like that. So busy popping them out she can’t even take a breath to come up with something until the last minute. I’d call him Bradley, after our father. But she won’t; she’ll pick something stupid like the last one, Preston. Ugh. I scan the space. There are four Isolettes filled with babies. So many in one place. Each little person will be heading out the door for a lifetime with their parents. There’ll be birthdays. Christmases. There’ll be graduations. There’ll be every special occasion that anyone could imagine. I want to reach through the glass and hold one. Any one. All of them.

A nurse gives me a concerned expression from the other side of the nursery. She points in my direction. I snap out of my thoughts and follow the trajectory of her scrutiny. I turn my hand upward.

Blood.

I’d dug my fingernails into my palms. It didn’t hurt. I didn’t even notice that I’d done it.

It was only a little blood anyway. Barely a speck.

It’s early last fall, and I see my doctor’s smug face on my phone. I ask a young law student, there for an informational interview, to excuse me while I take a call. When he shuts the door behind himself, I swivel my chair to take in the view from the Seattle high-rise of my law firm. I’m on the forty-first floor and face northeast. A ferry cuts through the dark blue waters of Puget Sound to Bainbridge Island, and the Olympics are out in full force: only a dash of snow softens the jagged peaks.

“Hi, Doctor,” I say. “It’s good news, right?”

Dr. Yamada lets out a long, irritating sigh. He hates it when I preempt every conversation with the hope that whatever he’s about to tell me is going to be good. Admittedly, I’ve been overly hopeful during this ordeal. Stupid. Hopeful. Me. I took a regimen of Clomid the previous year, and nothing. Still I hoped. I was good at hoping, which is peculiar, considering hope doesn’t get anyone very far in a law practice. Facts move the needle here. Facts trump hope and wishes and dreams.

In this case, I think, I loathe facts.