At 75, I used my final frozen egg to have a baby — and three days after I brought her home, a weeping stranger knocked on my door.

Chapter 1 - The Knock on the Third Day

I was thirty-three when I froze my eggs.

Back then I was certain — not hopeful, certain — that I'd be a mother one day. I had a good job, a small apartment with a spare room I already thought of as the nursery, and a boyfriend I assumed I'd marry.

The boyfriend left. The next one left too. The job turned into a career, and the career turned into decades, and the spare room slowly filled up with boxes.

No husband. No children. Somewhere in my fifties I quietly folded the dream up and put it away, the way you put away clothes that don't fit anymore.

Then, at seventy-five, I did something my entire family called insane.

I still had one frozen egg left — one, after all those years of paying the storage bill every January without fail. I used it. I found a surrogate. I signed papers my sister Susan sat at my kitchen table and begged me not to sign.

Nine months later, in a hospital room that smelled like antiseptic and grocery-store flowers, a nurse laid my daughter on my chest.

Ivy.

She was perfect. Ten fingers, ten toes, a full head of dark hair, and a cry like she was furious the world had taken so long to get to her.

I cried so hard the nurse asked if I needed a minute. I told her I'd needed a minute for forty-two years.

I was finally somebody's mom.

Three days after I brought Ivy home, someone knocked on my door.

I remember I had her up against my shoulder, patting her back, a burp cloth over my forearm. I opened the door expecting a delivery.

A woman stood on the step. Maybe forty. A grey wool coat, buttoned one hole off. Her eyes were swollen and pink, the way eyes get after hours of crying, not minutes.

"Are you Eleanor?" she asked. "Eleanor Whitfield?"

"Yes."

Her gaze dropped to the baby on my shoulder and stayed there.

"Was she born three days ago?" she whispered.

My stomach dropped.

"Who are you?"

"The clinic called me yesterday," she said. "After your daughter was born."

Without deciding to, I shifted Ivy away from the door, both arms wrapped around her now.

"Why would the clinic call you?"