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“I would like to collect the embryos you’re storing for me. Right now, please.”
She purses her lips, eyebrows drawing together. “Ma’am, I’m not sure I understand—”
“You have several embryos here that were created with my eggs. That makes them mine. You’ll give them to me now. Look it up—Avery Capulet should be the name attached to the file.” I sound so even and cool. I sound like other-Avery. A little hopeful. A lot determined.
The woman—Cindy, if her nametag’s right—bends over her keyboard with a sidelong glance at me. “I do have those records,” she says cautiously, “but I can’t just release embryos to you. There’s a proper procedure, forms to fill out. It can take weeks to approve a transfer to your new facility. You can’t just take them yourself. Frozen embryos are—”
“They’re mine,” I insist, my voice raising an octave. “I’ll sign whatever you need me to sign. But I need those embryosnow.”
Cindy adopts a bitchy attitude, her eyebrows raised, her head cocked to the side. “It’s against policy,” she says, pausing for effect between each word. “If you take embryos out of cold storage and throw them in your car, they will be destroyed.”
I smile coldly. “That’s the plan,Cindy.”
She looks horrified, the bitchy attitude melting as she realizes I’m serious. “If you want embryos destroyed, that’s a different procedure. I can set up an appointment with our counselor, and you’ll need to bring your…” she clicks around on the screen, puzzled. “Your partner, I guess? Whoever the co-signer on your account is. It isn’t giving me that information for some reason.”
I think back to who that could be. My father? Enzo? Joshua? Or one of the lawyers my family keeps on the payroll? It sickens me that I can’t even accurately guess which one of them it would most likely be.
Joshua, probably. He’s the father, after all.
“The father is otherwise indisposed,” I protest. “He’s in prison, and I don’t know when he’s getting out.”
Cindy shrugs. “I’m sorry, I can’t help you.”
I see red. And poor Cindy is the one in my direct line of fire.Ha. Line of fire. How fitting.
“Cindy, listen.” I tip my open purse toward her, and at first, I can tell she doesn’t understand. Then she looks inside to where the shiny silhouette of the gun leans against my slim wallet. “I don’t have time for this shit. If you don’t get me what I’m asking for, I’ll take this gun out. If you still don’t get me what I’m asking for… well, I’m not a very experienced shot. I would hate to accidentally shoot you. It’s not personal. You know? I just will. I’m at that kind of point in my life.”
The blood drains from Cindy’s face, leaving her pale underneath her auburn hair. Her mouth works. Does she feel that rush of adrenaline, just like I did? That thundering, beating fear of being firmly planted in the crosshairs of life and death? The difference is that Cindy gets to go home at the end of the day. I won’t actually shoot her.
Not on purpose, anyway.
She raises one hand—please, don’t—and hits a few other keys on the keyboard.
“Ma’am.” Her voice shakes, but she keeps her head held high. Good woman. She hasn’t been broken yet. Not like I have. “The embryos are in our storage facility.”
“Wonderful. You can take me there.”
I put my hand in my purse and pick it up. Cindy hesitates. I hold my breath. She steps out from behind the desk and takes the other door, not the one the patient took earlier. Better and better. It’s not like I actually want to hold a woman up in front of a bunch of people who are struggling to have babies. If we can avoid that spectacle, it’ll be easier for everybody.
I wait until I’m sure we’re alone to take the gun out of my purse and press it to Cindy’s back. She stiffens, gasping, and it’s fucking sick, but I’m relieved. She’s going to give me what I want and then at least one small part of this nightmare will be over.
We walk down a long, narrow hallway together and through a door marked STAFF ONLY. Cindy punches in a code on the keypad set into the wall and the lock releases. She keeps her eyes forward and leads me into a room marked COLD STORAGE.
It’s nothing special. A room filled end-to-end with tall metal shelves, each one crammed with metal containers that remind me of giant milk jugs. That must be for the liquid nitrogen, to keep all those unborn babies safely frozen, floating in their own life-and-death crosshairs until someone thaws them and gives them a warm uterus to burrow into.
Or until they’re thawed and left to die.
I knew going in that there would be a lot of these. Women want to get pregnant, right? Women will do anything to have a family. But there areso many. This isn’t even a huge room, by my standards. I’ve been in ballrooms that could fit thousands of these cryopreservation tanks.
There are just so goddamn many.
I swallow down a hard lump in my throat, baffled at the tears gathering in the corners of my eyes. Now is not the time to break down over this. It’s just that standing in a room filled with so many possibilities when my life, which was supposed to be all possibility, has come to this point...
Fuck.
I pull myself together just in time. “Where are mine?”
“Row E. Canister 15.” Cindy glances back at me. I lower the gun. I’m not going to fucking shoot her in the middle of all these frozen lives, waiting for something new to start. Also, the gun isn’t loaded. She doesn’t need to know that, though. “It’ll have an ID number on it. E-631.”
