Chapter 5 - The Woman Whose Name Was in the File
Alyssa asked whether Evelyn wanted the donor’s name redacted from the paperwork before it left the hospital record.
“No,” Evelyn said. “I need to know who she is.”
Diana Keller.
The name stirred something half-remembered. Not from the clinic. From a photograph she had once found while putting away winter scarves in Nathan’s closet. Nathan, younger and smiling in a black tux, standing beside a dark-haired woman in a silver dress. He had taken the picture from her hand too quickly.
“College,” he had said. “Old history.”
That night, in Julia’s guest room with Lucy asleep in a borrowed bassinet, Evelyn searched the name.
Diana Keller, thirty-four, development director for a Manhattan arts foundation. A feature in a donor newsletter mentioned that she had returned to work after being diagnosed with cardiomyopathy two years earlier.
Heart condition. Pregnancy too risky.
Nathan had not invented that part.
Evelyn called the number listed for the foundation, then hung up before speaking. Ten minutes later, her phone rang.
“Is this Evelyn?” a woman asked.
Her voice was low and cautious, with the flat vowels of someone who had spent most of her life in New York.
“Yes.”
A pause.
“Nathan told me you knew.”
The sentence settled like cold water.
Evelyn sat down hard on Julia’s bed.
“No,” she said. “He told me while I was in labor.”
On the other end, Diana stopped breathing for a second.
“He said you wanted to wait until after the baby was born to talk to me,” Diana said. “He said genetics were painful for you and that you needed the pregnancy to feel undivided.”
Julia, sitting across the room with Lucy, looked up from the baby at the expression on Evelyn’s face.
“What did he tell you?” Evelyn asked.
“That you and he couldn’t make viable embryos. That you had chosen a known donor because you wanted the child connected to someone he trusted. He said you agreed to keep my name private until delivery.”
Evelyn closed her eyes.
The unsigned white orchids that had arrived at the hospital after her transfer. The note she thought was from a friend who preferred not to make a big deal of infertility.
Thank you for carrying hope farther than I ever could.
They had been from Diana.
“Did you plan to take this baby?” Evelyn asked.
“No.” Diana sounded offended and ashamed all at once. “I donated eggs. I did not hire a surrogate.”
Then she said the sentence that made the truth more dangerous, not less.
“Nathan asked me last week to meet him after you delivered because there were ‘complications’ with what you’d agreed to.”
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There had never been one lie.
There had been two women, each given a different version of the same future, and Nathan had expected both of them to stay where he put them.
