In the drawer was a folder containing newspaper and magazine clippings on the subject of fertility that she had accumulated from around the time she and Morton were trying to become pregnant, and earlier. They went back years now. Several were yellowed and brittle. She turned them over, glancing at their headlines:

Picture Emerging on Genetic Risks of IVF

U.S. Panel About to Weigh In on Rules for Assisted Fertility

The Gift of Life—and Its Price: Fertility Treatments Bring More Twins and Premature Births

Twenty-First-Century Babies: Painful Choices with Fertility Treatment Lowering the Odds of Multiple Births

Life After Infertility Treatments Fail

She had to hand it to the Times: they knew how to deliver a portentous headline like no one else. Where were the happy stories, the stories of dreams answered, families built out of barrenness and despair? Where were the ten thousand babies born through Henry’s clinic alone? Ten thousand. He had reached that figure sometime before he and Costanza met. There had been a celebration in Central Park. Henry had invited all ten thousand—a whole city of Henry-fabricated lives. About fifteen percent of them had turned up, families in tow. Many of them were grown. Some had children of their own. They ate hot dogs and hamburgers, hundreds upon hundreds of them, on a balmy June day. At the end of the afternoon Leopold was given the honor of cutting a ribbon that released an enormous bouquet of pink and blue balloons into the sky. Henry told Costanza it was one of the finest days of his life.

There had been an article on the celebration—the Times wasn’t one hundred percent doom and gloom, after all. Costanza had forgotten reading it and she had forgotten clipping it. But there it was, near the back of her folder: Ten Thousand and Counting: A Fertility Doctor Throws an Unusual Anniversary Bash.

Before she read it, she replenished her glass of wine, pouring more than a shadow now, then returning to her desk. Her eyes shot to Henry’s answer to the reporter’s most personal question. Did reaching this milestone, he asked, make Henry feel like some kind of omnipotent power, a wizard of reproductive fertility? Henry replied:

Come on! That’s preposterous. Nature has all the power; I’m simply nature’s student. My science is a tool, a quite clumsy means to a very important end. The means is not the point. The point is becoming a parent, making a family. When I look back on my life’s work, I’m humbled that I have been able to help so many couples to give birth.

This didn’t sound like the talk of a demon.

The studio had a stale, lifeless scent; Henry’s apartment had an acrid one, as though something unnatural was burning. Costanza smelled it the moment she opened the door.