Mrs. Fleming, I know this process is hard. We’ll take good care of everything.
I had believed her.
“Why would she do it?” I asked.
“Money, perhaps. Loyalty to Connor. Pressure. We don’t know.”
I picked up the photo.
Something about her eyes made memory stir again.
“She knew me,” I said.
Kenneth frowned. “From the clinic.”
“No.” I shook my head slowly. “Before that.”
He waited.
I searched through years of faces. Hospital fundraisers. Medical school events. Fertility seminars. Charity panels. Waiting rooms. Conference badges.
Then it came to me.
“My mother,” I whispered.
Kenneth leaned forward. “What about her?”
“Dana worked for my mother’s oncologist years ago. Not as a nurse. Front desk, maybe billing. I remember because she sent flowers after my mother died.” I looked up. “Why would she later work at my fertility clinic?”
Kenneth’s expression changed.
Not dramatically.
Enough.
“That may be coincidence,” he said.
“But you don’t think it is.”
“I think we need to verify timelines.”
My office felt colder.
I looked at the rain-streaked window.
My mother had died six years before Connor and I started fertility treatments. She had never known how hard we tried. Never sat with me through failed cycles. Never told me whether hope was worth the pain.
But Dana had been there, somewhere at the edges of both losses.
“Could she have had access to my old medical information?” I asked.
“Possibly limited information, depending on her role. But old oncology office records would not explain fertility clinic documents.”
“No,” I said. “But it means she recognized me.”
Kenneth nodded slowly. “That is possible.”
My phone buzzed.
A message appeared from an unknown number.
For a moment, I thought it might be Melinda.
It wasn’t.
The text contained no greeting.
Just a photograph.
I opened it with stiff fingers.
It showed a storage room. Metal tanks. Labels. A gloved hand holding a small white tag close enough for the printed words to be read.
FLEMING/SINCLAIR – EMBRYO SET B
Below the photo was one sentence.
Ask Connor what happened to Set A.
I stopped breathing.
Kenneth stood. “Kirsten?”
I turned the phone toward him.
He read the message once.
Then again.
The rain tapped steadily against the glass behind us.
Set B.
My voice barely rose above a whisper.
“Kenneth… how many embryos were there?”
He did not answer immediately.
And in that silence, I understood something worse than betrayal had been waiting beneath the first secret.
There had been more than one missing future.
PART 3
For a long moment, the rain was the only sound in my office.
It tapped against the window in thin, silver lines, steady and patient, while the message on my phone seemed to burn through the screen.
Ask Connor what happened to Set A.
Kenneth did not reach for the phone right away. He simply stood there, reading the words as if the space between them mattered as much as the message itself.
I could hear the hospital around us. A cart rolling somewhere down the corridor. A soft page over the speaker system. A child laughing in the distance, high and bright, unaware that the world could split open inside one small office.
“Kirsten,” Kenneth said carefully, “do you recognize this number?”
I shook my head.
My thumb hovered over the screen, but I did not type. My hands, the hands that could start an IV in a moving emergency bay and steady a panicked parent with one touch, suddenly felt disconnected from me.
Set B.
There had been enough grief in believing there were no embryos left. Enough pain in thinking every possible future had ended behind clinic doors and failed phone calls.
But this message suggested something else.
