ONE
Millie
The waiting room smelled like lavender and quiet desperation.
Or maybe that was just me.
I smoothed the printed spreadsheet across my knee for the fourth time, like flattening it would change the numbers. It wouldn't. I'd run them six different ways on my phone on the drive over and three more times in the parking lot and once more in the elevator, and they kept coming out the same:not enough.Not yet. Not with the job gone and the savings half-depleted and the three months of rent I still owed on an apartment in San Antonio that cost more than my mother's first house.
The numbers said:not this year, Millie.
The numbers could go to hell.
I folded the spreadsheet in half so I didn't have to look at it and pressed my hands flat on top and breathed in through my embroidered mask—the blue one with the marigolds my tía Rosa sent from Oaxaca, because if I was going to sit in a waiting room and quietly fall apart I was at least going to do it in something pretty. Outside the window, June was happening aggressively. Inside, the AC was set to the temperature of a sensible cardigan, and the chairs were the kind of padded waiting room chairsdesigned to communicatethis will be fine, everything is finewhile you waited to discuss something deeply personal with a stranger in a white coat.
Everything was not fine.
I'd had a plan. That was the thing—I'd had an actual plan, a real one, with a timeline and a savings goal and a color-coded spreadsheet, and I'd been eighteen months away from making it happen when the Riverwalk shut down and the hotel suspended operations and my boss's camera had been off for that Zoom call and I'd known before he said a word.
We're so sorry, Camila. We'll be in touch.
They had not been in touch.
So here I was. Twenty-six years old, unemployed, sitting in the waiting room of the San Antonio Fertility Center in my tía's mask with a spreadsheet on my knee that said I could not afford the thing I'd come here to discuss, waiting for a consultation I had already decided was probably pointless, because I was a woman who finished things she'd started even when the thing she'd started had quietly become impossible.
You want a baby so bad,my best friend Daniela had said, when I'd told her about the plan, back when it had still been a plan.You could just, like. Meet someone.
I've been trying to meet someone for three years,I'd said.
You've been working eighty-hour weeks for three years.
Same thing.
She hadn't argued with that.
The thing was—and I'd explained this to Daniela, and to my mother, who had lit approximately forty candles in response, and to my father, who had saidsweetpea, are you surein the careful voice he used when he was trying not to sayMillie, this seems insane—I wasn't giving up on meeting someone. I wasn't closing a door. I was just. Tired of waiting for a door that might not exist while the thing I wanted most kept getting pushedfurther down the timeline by jobs and apartments and men who were fine, perfectly fine, just never quite right.
I was twenty-six. I knew that wasn't old. My mother had me at thirty-two and liked to mention it whenever the subject came up, which was often.
But I'd wanted this my whole life—not just a baby, afamily, the loud messy kind I'd always half-had and half-invented, the kind where someone was always in the kitchen and someone was always arguing about the radio and there were always too many people at the table and not enough chairs. I was an only child of two people who loved each other very much and had given me everything except siblings, and I had spent my entire childhood at my cousins' houses pretending I lived there.
I wanted the table with not enough chairs.
I wanted it badly enough that I'd made a spreadsheet.
The spreadsheet said no.
I unfolded it again. Stared at it. Folded it again.
Unfolded it?—
“‘Scuse me, ma’am. Is this seat taken?”
My eyes snapped up to the source of that deep voice, and I found…wow.
Well, I couldn’t describe him as anything but a giant.
He was six-three at least, maybe more, and broad enough through the shoulders to cast a man-shaped shadow over me. He was in a plain dark blue shirt, open at the throat to reveal a dusting of dark chest hair, and he had the hands of a man who worked for a living. I couldn’t see his face with the shadow. I couldn’t have cared less.
