Chapter 2 - The Four Embryos
Kenneth and I met when I was twenty-eight.
He was charming in a deliberate way—never loud, never desperate, always making you feel as though choosing him had been your idea.
We married three years later and bought a house in Cherry Hills Village with money from both families and a mortgage neither of us could comfortably carry alone.
The fertility problems began almost immediately.
My ovarian reserve was lower than expected. Two retrieval cycles gave us four viable embryos after testing.
Those embryos became the center of our marriage.
Then the center became a fault line.
Kenneth wanted transfer after transfer.
I wanted time between losses.
After my miscarriage, I asked for a full year before trying again.
He called that surrender.
Maya knew all of it because she was married to my younger brother, Luke.
She sat beside me after the miscarriage while I cried into a hospital blanket.
She brought casseroles.
She texted me on Mother’s Day because she knew I would hate everyone else pretending the date was ordinary.
Six months later she started sleeping with my husband.
At first, I thought the affair was the whole betrayal.
The form on Kenneth’s hospital bed changed that.
The document claimed I authorized our embryos to be thawed and discarded if Kenneth submitted written confirmation that our marriage had “irretrievably broken down.”
That language made no medical sense to me.
It sounded legal.
Calculated.
I photographed both pages before Kenneth ripped them away.
“You’re stealing private medical information,” he said.
“My name is on it.”
“You don’t remember half the things you sign.”
Maya’s face tightened.
That sentence mattered.
Kenneth had spent the previous year describing me as forgetful after the miscarriage.
Overwhelmed.
Emotionally erratic.
He would tell friends I misplaced keys, forgot appointments, repeated questions.
Sometimes I had.
Grief does that.
But now I wondered how often my normal mistakes had been turned into something useful.
A hospital social worker separated us after the argument escalated.
I called my attorney friend, Natalie Brooks, from the parking garage.
She listened without interrupting.
Then she asked, “Did you actually tamper with the item that sent them to the hospital?”
“Yes.”
“Do not lie about that if police ask.”
“I wasn’t going to.”
“Good. Because you may have legal exposure too.”
I sat in my car staring at the hospital entrance.
Kenneth had cheated.
Maya had betrayed my brother.
They may have forged my reproductive consent.
And I had responded with an act reckless enough to let Kenneth call me exactly what he had been calling me for months.
Unstable.
Before dawn, I called the fertility clinic’s emergency line.
The administrator who answered went quiet after looking up my account.
“Mrs. Rollins,” she said, “there was a request concerning your embryos three weeks ago.”
My hand tightened around the phone.
May you like
“What request?”
“To change their disposition.”
