My third embryo had carried his flawed genetic profile, a child who never had a chance to grow because he refused to tell the truth.

The fifty million dollars sitting in that Manhattan bank wasn’t a gift or some act of corporate charity.

It was a debt paid for eleven long years of silence and for the lost child I had grieved in dark rooms.

I stayed in the pew until the wax burned down to the rim of the brass holder.

When I got up, I left the original clinic papers on the little wooden ledge by the altar for the administrative archive staff to pick up.

By half past seven, the sky outside my seventh-floor hotel window had gone a deep purple over Midtown.