Marissa entered the building through a back door. She wasn’t interested in talking to anyone. With effort she climbed the fire stairs, then snaked through several exam rooms, making her way to her office. Closing her door, she didn’t bother to turn on her light. She was confident no one knew she was there, and as depressed as she was, she wanted to keep it that way.

She didn’t bother to check her messages for fear the results from her pregnancy test had already been called in. Instead, she sat and brooded at her desk. Never had she felt so isolated and alone. Except for Wendy, she couldn’t think of anyone to talk with.

After an hour, she began to entertain the idea of seeing some walk-in patients to take her mind off things, but then she quickly realized she was still too distraught to concentrate.

All she could think about was the Women’s Clinic.

When the telephone rang, she lifted the receiver off the hook before the first ring had completed. It had startled her.

“Hello?” she said.

“Dr. Blumenthal?” a woman’s voice asked.

“Yes,” Marissa said.

“This is the lab over at the Memorial,” the woman said. “We have your beta human chorionic gonadotropin level. It was only two mg/ml. We can do another in twenty-four or thirty-six hours if you’d like, but it doesn’t look good.”

“Thank you,” Marissa said, her voice completely flat. She wrote down the value, then hung up the phone. It was exactly as she feared: a result just like Wendy’s. She wasn’t pregnant!

For a moment Marissa merely stared at the figure she had written on her scratch pad. Then her vision blurred with tears of grief. She was so tired of it all. She began to think of Rebecca Ziegler again and the troubles that drove the poor woman to suicide—if it was suicide.

Suddenly the phone rang again. Marissa grabbed the receiver with the ridiculous hope that it was the lab at the Memorial calling to say they had made a mistake. Could she be pregnant after all?

“Hello?” Marissa said.

“The operator told me you were in,” the receptionist explained. “You have a visitor down here in the main reception. Should I . . .”

“I can’t see anyone,” Marissa said. She hung up the phone. Almost immediately it rang again. This time she ignored it. After nine rings, it stopped.

A few minutes later there was a knock on her door. Marissa didn’t move. There was a second knock, but she continued to ignore it, hoping whoever it was would go away. Instead, she saw the knob turn. Marissa faced the opening door, ready to snap at whoever dared disturb her. But when she saw Dr. Frederick Houser’s portly figure at the threshold, she softened.

“Is there something wrong, Marissa?” Dr. Houser said. He was holding his wire-rimmed glasses in his hand.