Chapter 3 - What the Clinic Knew
I stared at the phone across the room. The clinic's name glowed on the screen like something I'd done wrong.
"I have to take this," I said.
Rachel nodded, but she didn't step back toward the driveway. She stood just inside my doorway, eyes fixed on Ivy, and I turned my shoulder to block her view and answered.
"Mrs. Whitfield." A man's voice. Not one I recognized. Smooth, slow, every word set down carefully like he was walking across ice. "This is Dr. Pruitt, clinical director at Bayview Fertility. I'm calling because a matter has come to our attention that requires your immediate—"
"There's a woman standing in my house right now," I said. "Her name is Rachel Brennan. She says you called her yesterday."
Silence on the line.
"Mrs. Whitfield, we would really prefer to have this conversation in person."
"Tell me what happened to my eggs."
Another pause, longer.
"During your embryo transfer cycle, there appears to have been a documentation error. We believe a labeling discrepancy in one of our storage units may have resulted in—"
"Stop talking like a form letter. Say it in plain English. Right now."
A breath. "We may have used the wrong egg."
I walked to the kitchen and put my free hand flat on the counter to hold myself up. Ivy was tucked in my other arm, warm, weightless, sound asleep, with no idea her whole world was cracking straight down the middle.
"You may have," I said. "Or you did."
"Our internal review is still ongoing—"
"Is Ivy my biological daughter. Yes or no."
He didn't answer fast enough.
"Is she mine?"
"The preliminary genetic comparison indicates—" He stopped. Started over. "We believe the egg used in your surrogate's transfer belonged to a different patient."
I set the phone down on the counter without hanging up. I could still hear his voice coming out of it, thin and tinny, still going.
I didn't pick it back up.
When I turned around, Rachel was standing in the kitchen doorway.
"You already knew," I said. "When you knocked on my door. You knew."
"They told me yesterday morning."
"And you came anyway. To my house. Three days after I carried her through that front door."
"I didn't know what else to do." Her voice broke apart on the last word. "Six years, Eleanor. Six years of shots and scans and losing every single one. And then a phone call telling me my egg was used and there's already a baby and she's already here — what was I supposed to do, sit in my kitchen and wait?"
"She has a name."
"I know she does."
"Her name is Ivy. And she is my daughter."
Rachel's jaw went tight. Not with anger. With something harder to put a word to.
"I'm not saying she isn't yours," she said, low. "But she's mine too."
That word hit me like a hand to the chest.
I looked down at Ivy. Still asleep. Her mouth working a little, the way newborns' mouths do, like she was dreaming about being fed.
"You need to leave," I said.
"Eleanor—"
"You need to leave my house right now. And you do not come back here again without a lawyer standing next to you. Do you hear me?"
Rachel looked at Ivy one more time. Her hand lifted a few inches off her side, then dropped.
She left without saying anything else.
I locked the door behind her. Then I slid down the back of it until I was sitting on the floor of my own hallway with my daughter against my chest.
The phone was still lit up on the counter. Dr. Pruitt was still talking to an empty kitchen.
I sat there a long time.
Then Ivy made a small noise — not a cry, just a breath with a little voice riding on it — and I pressed my lips to the top of her warm head.
"You're mine," I whispered. "Whatever that report says. You are mine."
May you like
But there was a question already digging itself into the back of my mind, and I couldn't make it stop.
What if a judge didn't see it that way?
