Arianna smiled. “It will barely even sting, you big baby. Just think about me doing C-sections all day long.”
“But a shot every day for ten days?” A sobering thought must have entered Megan’s mind then, because her expression changed. “It’s fine. I can do this.”
“I know you can, sweetie. You’ll do great. Just imagine how you’re going to spend the five grand.”
Megan glared at her. “It’s insulting that you’re paying me.”
“That’s ridiculous. I’d pay more if I could.”
“And you promise no one’s going to arrest me, right?”
Arianna flashed her a conspiratorial grin. “What for? You’re just a bighearted egg donor.”
“What about—?” Megan’s voice lowered. “What about all the other donors? You trust them all right?”
“Completely. I handpicked every single one of them. No woman who puts her body on the line for science has any interest in destroying it.”
Megan nodded and then sighed. “Let’s get the damn shot over with already. I can’t stand the anticipation.”
Arianna smiled, thinking of the childhood nicknames their family had fondly given them: the worrier and the warrior. The irony struck her that their old roles still had not changed. Yet something between them had evaporated over the last few months, something precious, and just when they needed it most: lightness.
“First things first,” Arianna said as she stood up.
Megan groaned. “What?”
“You have to pick out the father,” she deadpanned.
“What?”
“We have a wide collection of donated sperm on hand from every race, age, creed, you name it. Widens the gene pool for the research. You can flip through the book and decide who you think your eggs would like best.”
Megan laughed in spite of herself. “If I didn’t know you that well, Arianna, I’d think you might be having fun with this.”
Arianna grinned. She was about to respond, determined to regain the tone of their old banter, when she felt herself inadvertently sway. Her office walls rolled into one another with quickening momentum as the pictures of newborns blurred around her, a spinning spread of faces and colors. Shutting her eyes, she sank to her knees in front of her desk and thrust one palm onto the ground. Her forehead dropped to the floor, sweat against cold. She was anchored. With her eyes closed and her body still, the spinning room began to slow down.
“Oh, Christ.” Megan’s voice hovered somewhere above her head. “Perfect timing. Do you need anything?”
Arianna didn’t dare shake her head, just as the world was coming to a halt around her. “Time,” she murmured into the floor.
She felt Megan’s hand stroking her hair. “Okay. Take your time. You know I’m in no rush.”
Arianna pressed her forehead harder into the ground, as if to prove the stability her senses refused to accept. She heard Megan stand up next to her.
“I’ll just go out and run an errand. Call me when you’re ready.”
“’Kay,” Arianna muttered. Around anyone else, she would have been mortified. At least, she thought, Megan knew enough not to make a fuss. Her footsteps fell away, and then the door opened and shut. Arianna breathed in, grateful to suffer alone.
* * *
Megan stepped outside onto Washington Square South. In her mind, she replayed the frightening way Arianna had just sunk to the floor like a dummy. What if she were really in trouble?
But she did what Arianna had long ago instructed: walked away. “Just let me be,” Arianna told her sternly the first time it happened in her presence. “I don’t need any help.”
Megan marveled at her bravery: How could she handle so much, so well? It just reminded her why she had looked up to her fearless cousin since childhood, when Arianna had ridden her bicycle without hands, approached popular boys she liked, dragged Megan onto her first upside-down roller coaster. Nothing ever seemed to faze her, while even as an adult, Megan panicked over the slightest medical problem. And now—
“Excuse me,” came a man’s voice behind her.
Megan turned around, holding her purse close to her body. The man looked a little older than she, in his mid-thirties. He wore faded jeans and a button-down white shirt and held a small notepad. A Yankees baseball cap covered his face in shadow, and when she looked at him, she understood why he wore it. Orange and brown freckles dotted his face with the frequency of pores; they lent him a juvenile quality that made him seem harmless.
“Can I help you?” she asked.
“I hope so,” he said with a tentative smile. “I’m actually a reporter on the health beat. My name’s Jed. I noticed you walk out of the fertility clinic right there, and I was wondering if I could ask you about it for a minute.”
Megan’s brow knotted. “Ask me about what?”
“Well, for starters, are you a patient at the clinic?”
“I am.” And how is that your business? she almost snapped, but didn’t.
“What made you choose to go there, out of all the clinics in the city?”
She stared at him. “Excuse me?”
“Sorry to be nosy,” he said, but his tone was urgent.
“Are you doing a survey or something?” she asked. I’m a patient, she thought. I’m supposed to want a baby.
“A survey? Kind of. You could say that. I’m trying to figure something out.”
“Well,” she said, “I decided to go there because I got a great recommendation about the doctor. What are you trying to figure out exactly?”
“I’ll tell you,” he said, stepping closer. “See, I got this tip that a bunch more women than usual are going to this one clinic all of a sudden. It’s such a small clinic, too. Maybe my mind’s overactive, but I thought it sounded like there might be a story there. See if the patients know something I don’t.”
“I see. Where’d you hear that?”
He shrugged with polished nonchalance. “A tip from a source. So, have you noticed anything? Off the record.”
Megan shook her head and tried to look puzzled. “I don’t know anything about that. But I will tell you that the doctors there
