Page 68 of Wrong Number Right Doctor

Maggie looks at me again. This time she doesn’t look away immediately.

For half a second, the room is gone. There’s only the memory of her saying, Goddamn it, I want you, and the present fact of her sitting across from me carrying another man’s arrangement in her body.

Possibly.

The thought returns. I push it down.

There is no place for it. Not yet. Not without information. Not in front of Alester.

But it’s there.

Alester folds his hands. “Dr. Acharya sees no immediate concerns. Petra has the next appointments organized. We will need discretion, naturally, until the pregnancy is further along.”

“Naturally,” Maggie says.

There’s something in her tone. Not obvious sarcasm. She’s too careful for that right now. But enough.

Petra hears it too. Her eyes move to Maggie and away.

I don’t know this woman, Petra, but I know her function in the room. She keeps the arrangement moving. She keeps Alester insulated from disorder. She likely knows more about Maggie’s schedule, body, payments, and compliance than Maggie wants her to know.

No wonder Maggie dislikes her.

Alester says, “I trust this will not interfere with your studies.”

Maggie’s smile is small and wrong. “I’ll manage.”

Alester seems satisfied. “Good.”

That word again. From him, it sounds like a box closing.

I look at Maggie. Her eyes flick to mine. For one moment, her face almost cracks.

Then Petra turns a page, and the sound pulls her back.

Alester asks me something about coordination with Dr. Acharya. I answer. My voice is measured. My questions are appropriate. Dates, records, reporting lines, emergency protocols, who has authority in urgent medical decisions, what has been agreed contractually versus what is clinically advisable.

I am professional. I am exact.

I do not ask the only question I care about: How did you end up here?

And beneath that: Why did you leave?

And beneath that, worse: Did I make you pregnant before they did?

Maggie says almost nothing through the rest of the meeting. But she hears every question I ask. I know because she looks at me differently after each one.

Not with relief. Not exactly. But as if somewhere in the middle of Alester’s room, surrounded by marble and old money and a woman with a tablet, she has realized that I’m not simply here to watch the arrangement proceed.

I am here now, whether she likes it or not.

Chapter Nine

MAGGIE

A plate appears in front of me sometime after Alester says the word viability.

I have no idea who brings it. One minute I’m sitting on the edge of a cream sofa, listening to men discuss my blood test like it’s a quarterly report, and the next there’s a small porcelain plate on the table beside me with something impossibly delicate arranged in the center.