“Been a while.” I cleared my throat and reached for the seat belt.

“So where are we going?” he asked, pulling out of the parking lot and onto the road.

“North,” I said. “Maybe to that place we went for New Year’s that one time.”

“Duluth?” he said. “That’s three hours away!”

“Yeah, I know,” I said, kicking off my shoes and wiping snow from my ankles. “I need to get away. Where no one can find me.”

“Why?”

“I’ll tell you,” I said, reaching back for the duffel. “Do you have utility scissors in here?”

He nodded toward the glove compartment. I dug around in there until I found the Leatherman, Digger’s handy all-in-one pocket tool we’d used to open bottles of beer and other emergencies.

“Just drive and we’ll find somewhere,” I said.

“I know a place,” he said.

And we were off into the night.

Two

Ruth

2001

Here’s how it is with me and other people, meeting new people: when I don’t care, I usually love them. But when I especially hope to like someone and want it to go well, that’s when problems inevitably emerge. I’ll find something to nitpick, even a small concern like a grammatical mistake, a poor handshake, or dirty hair. A faux pas, like failing to push in one’s chair after leaving the table, and any number of other small or large flaws will grate on me, build up and fester, and prevent me from instantly connecting. That’s how it was with Cally.

She looked great on paper, when she sent us an email in response to our ad on Craigslist. We said we were looking for an ambitious, brave young woman who was willing to donate her egg as well as carry the child for us: in other words, a traditional surrogate. We said we preferred not to work with an agency because it allowed us to have a closer relationship with the surrogate, and because Hal would provide the legal services, the fee to the surrogate could be higher. We emphasized that we wanted someone who was between nineteen and twenty-four, an unmarried woman with young, healthy eggs.

My eggs were, apparently, of “poor quality” due to my age. Of course, I hadn’t calculated this when I was younger; I’d been single and immersed in my career, so the timing would have been wrong. What a lousy curse, then, after I met Hal and we (or mostly I) wanted to get pregnant: my body wouldn’t cooperate.