“It was time,” she said, tapping the wheelchair’s padded armrest.
“I—I’m sorry,” he stuttered.
“I knew it was coming.” She paused, and in her eyes, an ember of mischief caught flame. “The good news is that I can finally beat you in getting just about anywhere, including up and down stairs. This thing goes eighteen miles per hour at top speed.”
Trent raised his eyebrows. This was sounding more like the woman he loved. If he closed his eyes, in fact, she would sound exactly the same, minus the troubling visual.
“You must be the fastest woman on earth now.”
“Something like that.” She smiled and leaned forward in the chair, propelling the machine into Trent’s apartment. “It senses my movements,” she called over her shoulder as she zoomed past him. She leaned backwards and it stopped.
“Not too shabby, huh?”
“That actually looks pretty fun,” Trent said, catching up to her. He leaned down and kissed her, then grabbed her hand to pull her up. She staggered out of the chair and took tiny steps toward the couch, holding his forearm. He noticed that her hand did not close fully around his arm, though she was struggling to keep her balance. When she let go and sank onto the couch, her fingers remained curled, like the petals of a dying lily.
He sat next to her and covered them with his hands. “I’ll cancel the lesson,” he said quietly.
“Don’t be silly. I came over early to practice.”
“What?”
She withdrew her hands and wiggled her fingers slowly. “I can still play scales, even if the tempo is molto largo. And I’m pretty sure I can still pull off twinkle, twinkle at least.”
Trent’s lips stretched into a thin smile. “You don’t have to prove anything to me.”
She narrowed her eyes. “This isn’t about proving anything to anyone. It’s about living my life to the fullest, and right now, playing your keyboard is about all the living I can manage. So if you will now get up and please escort me to the keyboard, I can practice for a while before Molly gets here.”
Trent studied her with awe. “That time outside the lab, you really meant it. When you said you were reclaiming your life.”
She nodded. The subtext of his words hung in the air between them, but she did not flinch or even avert her eyes. It was he who looked away first, he who struggled to stand as he lifted her from the couch and buried a kiss deep in her hair.
* * *
Two days later, Arianna felt excited for the first time since the crackdown. It was Friday morning, and Inspector Banks was leaving her clinic for the fourth time that week. Each morning he’d arrived, demanded to count the embryos, and then departed with a look of vague hostility. She always regarded him blankly, concentrating on the wall behind his head or the deep crease between his eyes. But this morning she bade him good-bye with a smile, as if she were seeing off a patient.
“I’m sure I’ll see you soon,” she said, beating him to his line.
He frowned and nodded, tucking his paperwork under his arm. “Bye, then.”
As soon as the door closed behind him, she scooted in her wheelchair straight through the hallway to Dr. Ericson’s office. It was thrilling to arrive there so quickly, after weeks of labored effort to walk the short distance. Her wheels squeaked over the linoleum floor as she leaned forward, daring herself to lean farther, to move faster. She hardly pitied herself at all.
A new donor’s egg-extraction surgery was scheduled for this afternoon. The woman’s supply of eggs was especially crucial: Arianna would save five of them for Sam as he had requested, in order to be prepared for—and oh, how she willed for—a breakthrough. The rest of the donor’s eggs would provide another batch of desperately needed embryos once they were mixed with donor sperm that the clinic had bought en masse from a sperm bank.
Arianna stopped in Dr. Ericson’s doorway.
“He’s gone,” she announced.
“Good.” Dr. Ericson set down a chart he was studying. “We have the young woman coming in at two for her extraction.”
“How many eggs do you think you’ll take out?”
“I would say we have a good shot at twenty. I saw her yesterday morning, and her ovaries were highly stimulated.”
“Perfect,” Arianna said. A typical extraction surgery yielded somewhere between fifteen and twenty eggs, and rarely varied from that range. As long as Dr. Ericson could take out twenty eggs, then Arianna could smuggle five of them to Sam, and record the extraction at the end of the day as a normal fifteen, without arousing the suspicion of the inspector, who was well aware of the typical range. Several months ago, in fact, a forty-two-year-old patient had undergone the same extraction surgery as part of the IVF process. When the woman’s aging ovaries produced only eleven eggs, the inspector who reviewed the records that month had seized on the low number, demanding a medical explanation in writing, and then had called the patient to corroborate it herself. Shortly thereafter, the DEP subjected the clinic to a random audit.
“I’ll tell Emily to separate out the five strongest eggs for Sam,” Dr. Ericson said. “But who’s going to bring them to him, and when, since none of us can go to the lab anymore?”
“Megan will. She’s planning to go in a few days anyway to finally bring Sam embryos again, so she’ll give him these egg cells as well. Then he’ll give her clones he made this week so she can come right back here and stock them.”
Dr. Ericson smiled. “I haven’t seen you beam like this in days.”
Arianna wished she could jump out of her chair and hug him, the man who was not just
