Chapter 15 - Four Names on a Storage Invoice
The next spring, I moved into a smaller townhouse in Greenwood Village.
No basement safe.
No enormous dining room.
No bedroom designed around a marriage that no longer existed.
Luke came over on Sundays sometimes.
We did not talk about Maya unless necessary.
His divorce was still being finalized because financial disentanglement moves slower than heartbreak. He had begun seeing a therapist and had stopped asking me whether I thought Maya ever loved him.
“I’m not sure that question helps anymore,” he said.
He was right.
Maya moved to Fort Collins after completing the first months of probation. She sent Luke one letter and me none.
Kenneth rented an apartment near Centennial and worked for a smaller financial-services firm in a non-client-facing role after completing required disclosures.
He never contacted me directly.
That was one of the few clean outcomes.
The fertility clinic sent the annual storage invoice in April.
Four embryos.
Still frozen.
Still legally unresolved beyond the temporary agreement.
For years, those four had meant future children.
Then failure.
Then grief.
Then leverage.
Then evidence.
I wanted them to become none of those things.
I met with a reproductive counselor without telling Luke, my parents, Claire, or anyone else what I hoped to decide.
She asked me a question nobody in the legal process had asked.
“If Kenneth had never forged the form, what would you have wanted?”
I cried because I did not know.
Not knowing felt different now.
It no longer meant someone else could decide.
After the appointment, I stopped at a coffee shop near the clinic and opened the latest storage statement.
Beneath the invoice sat three future options my attorney had asked the clinic to explain in general terms: continued storage, mutually authorized disposition, or further legal consultation regarding reproductive use.
I did not check a box.
Instead, I paid another quarter’s storage fee from my own account.
When I got home, a package from Luke was waiting on the porch.
Inside was the black evidence folder I had carried into Kenneth’s hospital room.
He had found it among boxes from our parents’ garage.
The affair photographs were still inside.
So were the receipts.
For a long time, I stood over the trash can holding them.
Then I shredded every photograph.
I kept only the forged fertility form.
Not because I wanted to remember Kenneth.
Because seeing my false signature reminded me of the one boundary I would never negotiate again.
Months later, when the clinic called asking whether I wanted to schedule another counseling appointment before the storage extension expired, I looked at the calendar on my kitchen wall.
There was no husband to convince.
No mistress to defeat.
No brother to protect.
No courtroom waiting for an answer.
May you like
“Not yet,” I said.
I hung up, placed the storage invoice in a drawer instead of a safe, and went outside to meet Luke for dinner—still uncertain what would happen to the four embryos, but certain that the next signature beneath my name would finally be mine.
