Chapter 5: The Years That Were Taken
Thomas didn't sleep that night.
I knew because I didn't either.
We lay in the dark on opposite sides of the bed, not touching, both of us staring at the ceiling, and the silence between us was full of things that hadn't been said yet.
Finally he said, "How long have you felt it?"
"Felt what?"
"That she was doing it on purpose."
I thought about it honestly.
"Since the first Christmas.
When she handed me the wine."
Thomas turned his head toward me.
"That was three years in."
"I know."
"Why didn't you tell me?"
"I did tell you.
You told her to stop."
"I mean really tell me.
That you thought it was deliberate."
I looked at the ceiling.
"Because you loved her.
And I didn't want to be the person who made you choose."
He was quiet for a moment.
"You've been protecting me."
"I've been surviving," I said.
"There's a difference."
He reached across and found my hand in the dark.
We stayed like that for a while.
In the morning, Thomas called a family solicitor — a woman named Grace Elliot who had handled his father's business affairs for years.
He explained what Donna had said about the clinic.
Grace listened without interrupting.
When he finished, she said, "I need to speak with Claire directly.
And I'll need the name of the clinic and the approximate dates."
We met her at her office two days later.
Grace was in her sixties, with reading glasses on a chain and the manner of someone who had heard a great many things and been surprised by very few of them.
She sat across from me with a notepad and asked me to walk her through both IVF cycles in detail — what I remembered, what had felt unusual, any communication from the clinic that had seemed out of place.
I told her about the coordinator.
The rushed consultation.
The letter.
Grace wrote steadily.
"Did you keep the letter?"
"Yes."
"I'll need a copy." She looked up.
"Claire, I want to be straightforward with you.
If Susan contacted the clinic and misrepresented herself — as a family member with authority to raise concerns, for example — and if that contact influenced your care in any way, that is a serious matter.
It may not lead anywhere.
It may lead somewhere significant.
But it needs to be looked at."
Thomas said, "What would you need?"
"The clinic's records of any external contacts during Claire's treatment.
They're obligated to log those.
It may take time to obtain them, but they exist."
I looked at the letter in my hands — I'd brought the original, still in its envelope.
The clinic's logo in the top corner.
The careful, neutral language that had felt, at the time, like a door being gently closed in my face.
"She told Donna she made sure they understood the family's concerns," I said.
Grace nodded slowly.
"That's a specific phrase.
It suggests she presented herself as speaking on behalf of the family unit.
Which she had no authority to do."
On the drive home, Thomas was quiet for most of it.
Then, stopped at a red light, he said, "She knew what those treatments meant to you.
She knew what every appointment cost us — not just money.
She knew."
"Yes," I said.
"And she called anyway."
"Yes."
The light changed.
He didn't move for a second.
The car behind us waited.
"I keep thinking about the second cycle," he said.
"How you were afterward.
How quiet you went."
I remembered it.
The particular quality of that silence — not grief exactly, more like the feeling of a room after something has been removed from it.
I had thought it was just loss.
I hadn't known there might have been a hand in it.
"Thomas," I said carefully.
"We don't know yet what she actually said."
"No," he agreed.
"But we're going to find out."
He pulled forward through the intersection.
That evening, Matthew called.
Not Susan.
Matthew.
"I want you to know," he said, when I answered, "that whatever Grace needs from me — testimony, records, anything — she has it."
"Thank you, Matthew."
A pause.
"I'm sorry it took me this long to see it clearly."
"You saw it last night," I said.
"That's what matters."
After I hung up, I sat at the kitchen table for a long time.
Then Donna sent a text: *She called me this morning.
Told me I'd destroyed the family.
I told her she'd done that herself.*
I set the phone face-down on the table.
Outside, it was getting dark.
Thomas was in the other room.
I could hear him on the phone — his voice low, steady, the voice he used when he was holding himself together by will alone.
I thought about the necklace at the bottom of the wine glass.
The tiny plastic bottles.
The miniature pacifiers.
Took me forever to find those little bottles.
She had gone looking for them.
She had found them.
She had paid someone to string them together.
She had wrapped them in velvet and driven to my birthday dinner and placed them in my hands and laughed.
May you like
I thought about all the years I had told myself she didn't fully understand what she was doing.
I didn't think that anymore.
