Hush

LAKE KICKED OFF the sheet and tore down the hall to the foyer. Her purse was on the hall table and she upended it, spilling the contents. She pawed through the clutter until she found her BlackBerry and scrolled to the camp’s emergency number. Five rings, then a deep hello. It was the gravelly voice of Mr. Morrison, the director.

“This is Will Warren’s mother,” Lake said quickly. “He’s in cabin seven-um no, five, cabin five. Did someone just call me?”

“What?” he asked groggily, clearly not comprehending.

Lake explained the situation, trying to keep her voice even.

“No, it wasn’t me,” he said. “But let me go down to his cabin right away. I’ll call you back in ten minutes.”

Pacing the hallway, Lake tried to convince herself that nothing was wrong-the camp director would have known-but as the minutes passed without a call, her alarm ballooned. Had Will been abducted? Did this have something to do with Jack?

Fifteen minutes later, her BlackBerry finally rang.

“There’s absolutely no reason for concern,” the director said. “Will is fast asleep, and the counselor says he’s been fine all night. Sounds like it must have been a wrong number.”

It had to be, she thought. For one thing, Will’s name was just Will, not William and someone really familiar with him wouldn’t make the mistake. And why would anyone she knew call at this hour? Her mind flew back to Jack. Had he orchestrated it, because of his custody fight? But what would he gain from a stunt like that? After crawling back into bed, it took her over an hour to fall asleep again.

The next morning she woke feeling hungover from worry-about the phone call, about her conversation with Hotchkiss. She’d felt so giddy yesterday as she’d dashed toward lunch, and she wondered now when she’d ever summon that feeling again. It was almost a relief to be on the Eighty-sixth Street crosstown bus an hour later, headed to the offices of her new client on Park Avenue, the Advanced Fertility Center.

Her plan today was to finish up her background research about the practice. She’d been recommended for the job by Dr. Steve Salman, an associate at the clinic whose sister, Sonia, had been a friend of Lake’s in college. Private fertility clinics, compared to those affiliated with hospitals and universities, had a bit of a stigma attached to them. The perception sometimes was that making money took precedence over making babies. Lake had been hired to help the clinic overcome that hurdle and to stand out among the burgeoning number of competitors.

It was a challenge she relished. The trick in marketing was to find the unique aspect of a product or company- the unique selling position-and optimize it. To Lake it was like studying a drawing with a hidden object and then, with a thrill, finding it. Like most fertility clinics, this one focused heavily on in vitro fertilization (IVF), the process by which a woman’s eggs are removed from the ovaries, and then, after being fertilized by sperm in a petri dish or test tube, are transferred to her uterus or frozen for future use. The clinic had been particularly successful with women over forty. Lake needed to find ways to play that fact up without turning off younger patients. In a week and a half she would present her first round of ideas to the two partners.

As much as she enjoyed her work so far at the clinic, she always felt a moment’s hesitation when she first walked through the door. The reception area had been nicely decorated with minty green walls and plush carpeting, but to Lake the room seemed so melancholy. Though the women who sat there-some with husbands and partners, some without-hardly looked morose, Lake could sense how sad and tortured they felt underneath.

In a small way, she could relate to their anguish. Though she’d never grappled with infertility, her birthmark had created a deep sense of despair and hopelessness in her, starting in childhood. By eleven she’d become an egghead in school, caught up in endless art and history projects and pretending nothing else mattered, when all she really wanted was to be normal, to be pretty, to never again have to see that double beat of surprise and pity in people’s eyes. A doctor had saved her with his laser. She knew it didn’t take a psychiatrist to see why she found herself drawn to clients in the health field.

For the past two and a half weeks she had worked in the small conference room at the very back of the clinic office. Today, as usual, she made her way there through the crazy warren of short corridors-past the doctors’ private offices, the nurses’ station, the hushed exam rooms, the futuristic-looking embryology lab, with its sliding window to the OR, where the egg and embryo transfers were done. As she was getting started, spreading open a folder on the conference room table, one of the nurses, a dark-haired Irish girl named Maggie, passed by the open door and smiled hello. About fifteen people worked at the clinic, and Maggie had been one of the warmest to her. Along with Dr. Harry Kline, the consulting psychologist.

Alone in the conference room, Lake read through the last articles in the batch she’d collected as soon as she was hired for the job. She’d been consuming anything that had to do with the clinic: journal articles the doctors had written, press stories that featured the practice. It was often in these kinds of materials that she found nuggets that she could begin to work with and leverage as part of a marketing plan.

While she worked, she tried to keep yesterday’s meeting with Hotchkiss out of her mind, but it wouldn’t leave her alone. The strange phone call from last night also gnawed at her. Before she’d gotten very far with her reading, she called the camp director again. He’d checked on Will that morning, he said, and everything was fine.

About an hour later, Rory, the clinical medical assistant, poked her blond head in the door. She was about thirty, tall and pretty in an athletic way, the kind of girl who looked like she’d led her high school basketball team into the state tournament. And she was five months pregnant, which Lake realized must be tough for some of the patients to see. Rory’s blue eyes were rimmed with black liner today and her blond hair was scooped up on her head in a loose bun.

“Brie hasn’t been by here, has she?” she asked.

“No, I haven’t seen her,” Lake said. Brie, the no-nonsense, tightly wound office manager, normally ignored her. Lake assumed it was because until Lake’s arrival, Brie had handled any so-called marketing for the clinic.

“Dr. Levin wanted her to give you a bio.”

“I think I’ve got everybody’s,” Lake said, glancing down at one of the folders.

“Dr. Keaton’s?”

“But he’s just a consultant, right? Why-”

“He’s decided to join the group,” Rory said, smiling. “He’s leaving his West Coast practice and coming in with us.”

“Oh, um-okay,” Lake said. To her surprise, the news flustered her.

“Is something the matter, Lake?”

“No, I just hadn’t heard the news yet.”

“Oh well, Brie should have mentioned it to you. You should be kept in the loop about these things.”

“Not a problem,” Lake said. She appreciated that Rory seemed to have picked up on Brie’s passive-aggressive streak.

Rory turned to go. Lake wondered if she should try to engage her in some kind of small talk, but it often seemed that Rory preferred to focus on the next thing on her list.

“You look very nice today, by the way,” Lake said. “Do you have a special night planned?”

“My husband’s traveling this week,” she said, smiling ruefully. “But I try to make an effort anyway. I think it’s so important not to let yourself go just because you have kids in your life. I hope you don’t mind my saying this, but you’re such a perfect role model. When I’m your age I hope I look as good as you.”

“Oh, thank you,” Lake said, a little taken aback.

She chose to take Rory’s comment as a compliment and got back to work. At close to eleven she realized it was time for her scheduled interview with Dr. Sherman, one of the clinic’s two partners, about some of the more advanced aspects of in vitro fertilization. She had done a number of these sessions with the doctors just to familiarize herself with their work. As she picked up her pad and got ready to head down the hall, Keaton himself appeared in the doorway. She felt her pulse kick up a notch. He was wearing perfectly draped navy pants, a crisp lavender shirt and a lavender-and-purple print tie. He looked great-and she was sure he knew it.

“Have they still got you locked down back here?” he said, grinning. “That seems awfully cruel on a gorgeous day like today.”

“It’s not so bad,” she said. “Congratulations, by the way.”

“Oh, right. Thanks. I just made the decision last night, in fact.

“And actually,” he added, stepping into the conference room and locking his slate-blue eyes with hers, “you’re actually part of the reason I accepted.”