Wren had signed forty-one insurance denials this year without her hand shaking once. It surprised her, a little, that this form was the one that did it.
Selection: Anonymous Donor #4471.
The clinic coordinator, a woman named Priya with a lanyard full of pins from conferences Wren had never heard of, slid the consent packet across the desk like she was dealing cards. "Take your time," Priya said, in the voice of someone who had said it four hundred times and meant it maybe half of those.
Wren didn't take her time. She'd spent eleven months taking her time — turning it over, testing the weight of it, waiting to feel less certain. She hadn't. If anything the last two weeks had sanded the decision down to something almost peaceful. There was a version of her life where a man's name went on a form like this instead of a number, and she had tried that version, and the last thing that man had told her, three days before the wedding invitations went to print, was that he needed "space to think," which turned out to mean a hotel room forty minutes away and a second phone she hadn't known to look for until she was looking for it on purpose.
She hadn't cried about the phone. She'd catalogued it — dates, message threads, the specific tenderness he'd used on someone named Bree that he'd stopped using on her sometime around March. Wren was good at reading a paper trail. It was, professionally, the only thing she was better than average at. She just hadn't expected to need the skill on her own life.
She signed her name under Donor #4471 in the neat, unhurried hand she used for everything, and did not think about the fact that she had chosen a stranger's genetic material with less agonizing than she'd once put into choosing a couch.
"You understand the donor is anonymous per clinic policy," Priya said, more statement than question, "and that the clinic verifies compatibility and health screening but doesn't disclose identity except under the conditions outlined in section four."
"I read section four."
"Most people don't."
"I read all four sections, and the addendum, and I looked up the accreditation body it references, which doesn't currently exist under that name, it merged with a larger one in 2019." Wren said this without heat. It was just true. Priya blinked at her, recalibrating, the way people sometimes did.
"Well," Priya said. "You're thorough."
"I like to know what I'm agreeing to."
What she was agreeing to, on paper, was a single procedure, twenty minutes, mild cramping expected, results in two weeks. What she was agreeing to underneath that was the only kind of family she still believed in — one that didn't require trusting a person not to have a second phone.
The procedure itself took eighteen minutes. Wren watched the ceiling tile with the water stain shaped vaguely like Florida and thought about nothing in particular, which she considered a personal victory.
Afterward, in the recovery room, a nurse handed her a juice box like she was seven, and Wren drank it because refusing felt like more effort than it was worth. Her phone buzzed once — a work notification, a flagged claim on a warehouse fire that smelled wrong to the adjuster, which meant it would smell wrong to Wren too by Monday — and she felt something in her chest unclench for the first time in months. Not happiness. Just quiet. The particular quiet of a decision that was, finally, made.
She drove home with the windows down even though it was cold enough that it didn't make sense, because she wanted to feel the air do something to her.
For four days, nothing happened, which was exactly what was supposed to happen.
On the fifth day, Wren was standing in the stairwell of the parking garage attached to her office — she always took the stairs, six flights, a habit from a period of her life when she'd decided she needed one thing she did purely for herself — when her phone rang with a number she recognized from the caller ID as the clinic.
She almost didn't pick up. She had a two o'clock with a claims adjuster who thought a burned-out server room was an act of God and not an act of a man who owed his brother-in-law money, and she was already composing the questions she'd ask him in her head.
She picked up on the fourth ring, halfway down the third flight.
"Ms. Calloway?" It was Priya. Wren recognized the careful, over-warm register clinic staff used right before delivering something that wasn't warm at all. She'd heard it before, from doctors, from her mother's oncologist, from Priya herself explaining the anonymity clause four days ago like it was a comfort and not a wall.
"Speaking."
"I need you to come back in. Today, if you can." A pause, filled with the particular static of someone choosing words on the fly. "There's been — we've identified an issue with your procedure that we need to discuss in person. It's a policy matter. Nothing medically concerning," she added, too fast, in the tone of someone who has been told exactly what she is and is not allowed to say.
Wren stopped on the landing. Below her, the stairwell door opened and closed somewhere, footsteps receding. "What kind of issue."
"I really can't get into it over the phone."
"Priya." Wren said the name flatly, the way she said a name to a claims adjuster right before she showed him a receipt he thought no one had kept. "You called me. Tell me what I'm coming in for."
The silence on the other end went on a half-second too long to be a good sign.
"There was a — a mix-up," Priya said finally, and even through the phone Wren could hear that the word mix-up was doing an enormous amount of work it was not built to do. "In the specimen tracking. We're required to disclose it, and there are — there are legal considerations around donor identity that are going to come up, and I don't want you to hear about this from anyone but us, and I really think it would be better if you came in."
Wren's hand tightened on the phone rail. Six flights below her, through the concrete and rebar and forty years of parking-garage architecture, she could hear — she would swear later she could hear, though it made no sense, though she would spend a week telling herself it was adrenaline and acoustics — the sound of someone's heartbeat. Too fast. Not her own.
"Legal considerations," Wren repeated slowly. "Priya. Whose specimen did I get."
"I can't — Ms. Calloway, please, just come in, we'll explain everything, there's someone here who—"
"Someone's there?"
"Please just come in."
Wren looked down the stairwell. Six more flights to her car, four days since a decision she had made specifically to never again find out that a stranger knew something about her life before she did.
"I'm coming in," she said, and hung up before Priya could soften it any further, and stood very still for a moment on the landing, listening — actually listening, straining for it — for a heartbeat that had no business reaching her from two hundred feet and eight inches of poured concrete away.
It was still there.
It was getting faster.
