Natalie's POV

At seven o'clock, while Victoria's guests were handing their coats to the valet at Riverside Country Club, I was sitting in a blue plastic chair at the Lakeshore Fertility Center.

The waiting room hadn't changed in four years. Same antiseptic smell. Same humming vending machine. Same poster on the wall across from me, a smiling couple holding a newborn wrapped in a white blanket, with the words *Your Family Starts Here* printed underneath.

The first time I sat in this chair, Alex had been in the one beside me. He'd laced his fingers through mine, nodded at that poster, and said, "That's going to be us, Nat. Someday. Just watch."

The chair beside me was empty now. I'd put my purse in it so no one would sit there.

A blue appointment slip lay in my lap, along with the cycle seven medication list I'd printed last week. Every box was unchecked. Every drug was still sealed in the bin at home.

"Natalie Carter?"

Dr. Melissa Ortega stood in the doorway with my chart under her arm. She'd done all six of my transfers. She'd also been the one to call me after each of them.

I followed her into the consult room and sat down across from her desk. Then I slid the medication list toward her before she could open the file.

"I need to cancel my seventh IVF cycle," I said. "My husband has taken the money."

She looked at me for a second, then gently put the paper down.

"I'm so sorry, Natalie."

"Don't be. I just need the paperwork."

She nodded and turned to her computer. "Give me a few minutes to pull the cancellation forms."

She stepped out. My phone buzzed in my purse.

It was a text from Jenna Kowalski, whose husband worked with Alex in the ER. We'd gone to their wedding together. I'd held her bouquet while she fixed her shoe.

*Nat, are you okay?? Are you seeing this?*

Under it was a link. *Live: Victoria's Celebration 🥂*

I should have put the phone away, but I tapped the link.

The video was shaky and loud, filmed from somewhere near the back of the ballroom. Crystal chandeliers. A champagne tower glowing gold under the lights, five tiers high. People were laughing and clinking glasses.

Then the camera found the stage, and there was my husband.

He was wearing the navy suit I'd picked out for him at Nordstrom last spring. I'd made the tailor take in the jacket twice. A silver pin glinted on his lapel, right over his heart.

He held out his hand, and Victoria took it. She walked up the steps beside him, no crutches, just leaning against his arm, her dress the color of champagne.

Alex tapped the microphone. The room quieted.

"Thank you all for coming," he said. "A few months ago, I almost lost someone who means more to me than I knew how to admit. Victoria, thank you for walking back into my life."

Applause. Someone whistled.

He looked down at her, and his face did something I hadn't seen in years. It went soft all the way through.

"Victoria and I are ready to stop hiding what we mean to each other."

The ballroom erupted. Victoria pressed her cheek against his shoulder, and Alex bent his head and kissed her forehead, right there under the lights, in front of everyone who had ever eaten dinner at our table.

I didn't feel surprised. I felt like a lock had finally clicked open.

The nights he didn't come home. The phone face down. The car turning the wrong way out of this very parking lot. The way he'd stopped touching me, stopped asking, stopped remembering. None of it had been random. It had all been leading to this stage.

The door opened. I turned the phone over on my knee.

Dr. Ortega set two pages in front of me and pointed to the signature lines. I signed both without reading them. My handwriting looked like someone else's.

"That takes care of the cycle," she said. She didn't take the forms back right away. "But there's something else we need to talk about, and I'd rather you hear it from me."

She opened my file and pulled out a printed sheet. The header said *Consent Withdrawal Notice*.

"We received this from Alex on Tuesday. Your husband has withdrawn his consent. We cannot proceed with a transfer."

I stared at the page. His name was typed at the bottom, with a scanned signature I'd know anywhere. The date matched the envelope he'd ripped out of my hands in our kitchen.

*Annual paperwork. Routine.*

"Withdrawn," I said. "From what, exactly?"

"From using your shared embryos for any future transfer."

My fingers were pressed so hard against the edge of her desk that the tips had gone white. I made myself look up.

"Are they still here? Both of them?"

"Yes."

"You're sure? You checked?"

She turned the monitor toward me. A storage record filled the screen, with two lines highlighted in yellow. *Embryo ID LFC-2207-A. Embryo ID LFC-2207-B. Status: Cryopreserved.*

"They're safe," she said. "Nothing has been destroyed. But until the consent issue between the two of you is resolved, we can't schedule a transfer. Not with your consent alone."

I read the two ID numbers twice. It was strange how something so small could look like a name.

"Can he have them destroyed?" My voice came out thinner than I wanted. "Can he just send another email and make them disappear?"

"No." She said it quickly and firmly, like she'd been waiting for me to ask. "Stopping a transfer and deciding what ultimately happens to the embryos are two separate things. Disposition is governed by the storage agreement you both signed, along with state law. One email from one partner doesn't override that."

She took a stapled document from the file and handed it to me. It was our storage agreement, the one we'd signed side by side in the room next door, Alex joking about the mortgage.

"That's your copy. Read section nine. And I'd strongly suggest you talk to an attorney."

I folded it carefully and slid it into my purse next to the blue appointment slip.

"I need you to preserve everything," I said. "Every record, every email he sent, every form. Don't let anything get changed or deleted. My lawyer will be contacting you."

I didn't have a lawyer yet. By Monday, I would.

Dr. Ortega made a note on the file. "Done. I'll flag the account myself."

She walked me down the hall. At the front doors, I stopped to pull up my hood, and my phone lit up in my hand. The video was still playing.

Alex was raising a champagne flute now, the silver pin catching the light.

"To second chances," he said. "And to finally being happy."

The whole room lifted their glasses with him.

Outside, rain was blowing sideways across the parking lot, cold enough to sting. Dr. Ortega held the door half open and looked at me with real worry.

"Natalie, is there someone who can come get you? You shouldn't drive upset."

I watched my husband drink to his happiness on a screen the size of my palm.

"He gets to celebrate his new beginning tonight," I said. "I need to protect what remains of mine."

I closed the video. Then I opened my settings and scrolled to my contacts until I found *Alex ♥*.

His ringtone was the song from our first dance. I'd set it eight years ago so I'd always know when he was calling, even from across a crowded room, even half-asleep. I used to smile before I even picked up.

I tapped it, selected *Default*, and saved.

The rain soaked through my hood as I walked to my car. Halfway across the lot, my phone started to ring.

A flat, ordinary chime, the same as any stranger's.

I didn't have to look to know who it was.

Natalie's POV

Marissa Cole's office was on the eleventh floor of a glass building downtown, and it smelled like fresh coffee and printer toner.

I'd brought everything in a black document folder I bought at Staples on Sunday night. Eight years of marriage fit inside it with room to spare.

"Have a seat, Natalie."

Marissa was in her fifties, with silver hair cut sharp at the jaw and reading glasses pushed up on her head. She didn't do the sympathetic head tilt. I liked her immediately.

I opened the folder and laid it all out on her desk. Our marriage certificate, the raised county seal still crisp. Three months of joint account statements, with the $28,000 transfer to Meridian Private Recovery circled in pen. The clinic's consent withdrawal notice, his scanned signature at the bottom.

"I want a divorce," I said.

The words came out level. I'd expected them to shake.

Marissa picked up the bank statement and studied it for a long moment. Then she set it down and folded her hands.

"I ask everyone this, so don't take it personally. Is there any part of you that wants to try to repair this? Counseling, a separation period, anything?"

I looked down at my hands resting on the folder. The bruise on the back of my left hand had faded to a sick yellow-green, ringed with tiny pinprick scabs from the IV at my last blood draw. Alex hadn't noticed it. He'd been too busy cutting toast.

"No," I said. "I'm not here to ask how to save my marriage. I'm here to end it."

She nodded once and slid a retainer agreement across the desk. I signed it without hesitating.

"Then let's talk about what you want."

"I want the joint property divided the way the law says it should be. Fairly. I have a small savings account from before we got married, plus what my mother left me. I'll disclose every cent of it." I tapped the clinic notice. "But I won't let him use our embryos to push me into anything. That's not on the table."

"Good. Clear priorities make my job easier." She turned to her monitor and frowned. "Funny timing. His attorney emailed me this morning. Before you'd even officially hired me."

"How did he know?"

"I imagine the clinic told him you'd requested a lawyer be involved." She hit print. "He's been busy."

The printer hummed. She handed me eight warm pages, already marked in yellow highlighter.

*Proposed Marital Settlement Agreement.*

I read the first page and felt my face go hot.

He'd keep the house and buy out my share at a valuation that couldn't possibly be right. He'd keep his retirement account untouched. The section on joint savings had a line drawn straight through it, with a note in the margin: *Exhausted by medical expenses.*

"Medical expenses," I said. "My IVF was paid out of that account for four years. Every cycle. Now he's calling it empty like I drained it."

"Keep going," Marissa said.

Page four was worse. *Joint Public Statement.* A paragraph we'd both sign and share with friends, family, and his colleagues at the hospital.

*After years of struggling with infertility, Alex and Natalie have mutually and amicably decided to part ways. The strain of long-term fertility challenges has taken a toll, and we ask for privacy during this time.*

I read it twice. Then I flipped through the rest, looking for one thing.

"There's nothing about the twenty-eight thousand."

"No." Marissa uncapped a red pen. "There isn't."

"And this." I pointed to the last highlighted clause. "Wife agrees to waive any objection to Husband's withdrawal of consent regarding the use of cryopreserved embryos."

I put the pages down before I crumpled them.

"He gets his new girlfriend, keeps the money, and expects me to sign a statement blaming my body?"

Marissa drew a thick red line through the joint statement. Then another through the waiver.

"He's writing the story before anyone else gets to," she said. "If you sign this, everyone you know hears that your marriage ended because you couldn't get pregnant. Not because he spent your savings on another woman's spa package."

That was exactly it. He'd decided I was the reason, and he wanted my signature on it.

My phone buzzed against the desk. An email from Lakeshore Fertility Center. *Re: Account Notice — Carter, Storage Inquiry.*

I opened it, and the room seemed to tilt.

"Natalie?"

I turned the screen toward her. "Dr. Ortega's office. She said she'd flag anything new." My voice thinned out. "Alex called them Friday. He asked about the procedure for ending cryostorage after a divorce is finalized."

Friday. The day before he stood on that stage and toasted to second chances.

Marissa read it twice, her mouth tight. "He asked. That's all he can do right now."

"He wants them gone."

"What he wants doesn't decide this." She pulled the storage agreement from my folder and flipped to section nine. "Final disposition has to follow this contract and state law. If there's a dispute, and there is, he doesn't get to make a phone call and have them destroyed. I'll send the clinic formal written notice today that this is contested. Nothing happens to those embryos without a court or a signed agreement from both of you."

I nodded. I didn't trust my voice yet.

From the back of my folder, I took out the printout I'd made last night. The two storage IDs, *LFC-2207-A* and *LFC-2207-B*. Paper-clipped behind it was the embryo photo the lab had given us after retrieval, two grainy gray circles under a microscope.

I used to keep that photo on the fridge. I'd stare at it while the coffee brewed and wonder whose nose they'd get. Whether they'd have Alex's dimples or my stubborn chin. Whether one would be a girl.

My thumb kept rubbing the edge of the photo until the corner went soft.

"He can refuse another transfer," I said quietly. "He cannot turn these embryos into a bargaining chip."

Marissa wrote something in red and underlined it. "Then that's what we'll make sure of."

I was halfway down the front steps of the building when my phone rang. The flat, default chime.

I almost didn't answer. Then I did.

"What the hell, Natalie?" Alex didn't say hello. "The clinic just called me. Some lawyer contacted them about a dispute. You sent a lawyer after me?"

"I hired an attorney. Yes."

"Over what? A few frozen cells?" Traffic roared somewhere behind him. "You're humiliating me with my colleagues. Dr. Ortega practically interrogated me."

I stopped on the last step. Pigeons scattered across the plaza.

He hadn't asked why I wanted a divorce. Not once.

"From now on, anything legal goes through Marissa Cole," I said. "Have your lawyer call her."

"Oh, come on. Don't do the cold thing." He let out a short laugh. "Honestly, there's no point fighting over the embryos anymore. I don't need them."

"What does that mean?"

"It means I already have a real child on the way."

The traffic noise kept going. I didn't move.

Then, very close to his phone, a woman's voice, soft and sleepy. "Alex? Is that her?"

Victoria.

My phone vibrated against my ear. Then again. I pulled it away and looked at the screen.

He'd sent a photo.

A lab report on clinic letterhead. *Quantitative hCG, Serum. Result: Positive.* And at the top, printed clearly in the patient field: *HALE, VICTORIA.*

I read her name three times.

Six rounds. Four years. My mother's pearls. Hundreds of needles in my stomach. Every negative test I'd sobbed over on the bathroom floor while he rubbed my back and promised me it didn't matter.

Eight years, and the whole thing had been a joke he was only now letting me hear the punchline to.

His voice came small and tinny from the speaker. I lifted the phone back to my ear.

"Did you get it?" he asked. He sounded almost proud.

I couldn't make a sound.

"Victoria is pregnant, Natalie. With my baby. She gave me what you couldn't."