Chapter 4: Back Through the Beacon Hill Door
I never made it to the airport.
Phoebe’s photograph stopped me on the curb. The clinic document was only a picture, its edges blurred and its meaning impossible to ignore. I called Nora Price from the car. By evening, she had arranged to come back to Boston with me. Cordelia came too.
Charles wanted me at the Beacon Hill house at ten the next morning. Alone, he specified.
I refused.
At the curb outside the mansion, Nora read his message over my shoulder. A cold wind swept along the narrow street, carrying the smell of wet stone and car exhaust.
“He says there’s no reason to involve anyone else,” she said.
“There’s a reason,” I replied. “He wants to decide what I’m allowed to see.”
Cordelia stood beside us, gloved hands clasped around the handle of her purse. The house behind her had been my home for twelve years. Its windows were dark, but I could picture the dining room, the long polished table, the place where Charles had offered me fifty million dollars as if setting a price could make betrayal civil.
My phone rang. Charles.
I answered, keeping Nora and Cordelia in view.
“You’re at the house,” he said.
“Outside it.”
“I asked you to come in.”
“Alone.”
A pause. Then a quieter voice, as if the softness itself were a gift.
“Hannah, we need to discuss what you’re doing.”
“I’m meeting Phoebe.”
“You’ve already met her.”
“She has something to show me.”
“That’s exactly why we should talk without an audience.”
I looked at the windows. “You mean without witnesses.”
He exhaled, impatient now. “Don’t turn this into something it isn’t.”
“I didn’t. You did.”
I ended the call.
Nora’s gaze stayed on me, alert but not steering. Cordelia glanced at the house.
“He used to say that when you asked a question he didn’t want to answer,” she said.
I couldn’t tell whether it was an apology or an observation. Maybe she couldn’t either.
The hotel was quiet enough that Phoebe’s nervous breathing seemed to fill the sitting room. She stood when we entered, one hand resting below the curve of her belly. She looked tired, and younger than she had at my dinner table—not because she was twenty-six, but because there was no audience to perform for.
“I’m glad you came,” she said. Her eyes went to Nora. “I wasn’t sure if this was going to feel like a hearing.”
“It doesn’t have to,” Nora said. “We’re here to see what you found.”
Phoebe reached into a folder beside the sofa and drew out a clinic document. This was the paper behind the photograph: two pages, folded once, with a small crease running through the printed lines. She’d found it among the wedding arrangements Charles had ordered delivered to her apartment.
“I thought it was just another medical form,” she said. “Then I saw Hannah’s name. I didn’t know what ‘genetic mother’ meant at first.”
“It means the eggs came from me,” I said.
“And the sperm?”
“Charles’s.”
Phoebe lowered her gaze. She held the paper by its edges, as though she didn’t want to leave fingerprints on it.
“He told me you gave the embryos to us. That you wanted to move on.”
“Did he say when I agreed?”
“No. He said you’d handled it through the clinic.”
“Did you see my signature?”
Her head moved slowly from side to side.
“Not until now. And this isn’t a transfer consent.” Her voice thinned. “I don’t even know what it’s supposed to be.”
Nora asked permission before taking the pages. Phoebe nodded. The three of us crowded close as Nora laid the document on the low table.
The printed line naming me as the genetic mother blurred for a moment. I blinked, and it steadied. I didn’t want Phoebe to mistake shock for accusation. She had carried these girls through seven months of appointments and private fear without knowing that I was part of their beginning.
Nora opened her folder and pulled out copies of my old treatment forms—the ones I had kept among my personal records. She laid them side by side.
“May I?” she asked.
I nodded.
Nora leaned over the table. Her finger hovered above the signatures without touching the ink.
“This slant is different,” she said. “And the initials don’t match the pattern on these pages.”
Phoebe looked from one sheet to the other. “So someone forged it?”
“I can’t tell you that from a comparison like this,” Nora said. “It’s a discrepancy. It needs to be verified against the clinic’s originals.”
The word discrepancy left a hollow little space in the room. Not proof. Not yet. But not nothing.
Cordelia stood by the window, looking down at the street. When she spoke, she didn’t turn around.
“I told you for years that you were the reason the family had no children.”
My body remembered before my mind could answer: the heat of the dining room, the tightened corners of her mouth, the way Charles would lower his eyes and let the remark stand.
“Yes,” I said.
“I told myself I was defending the family.”
“You were defending an idea of it.”
Cordelia faced me. Her chin lifted, but her eyes shone.
“I should have asked you what you were going through.”
“You should have stopped blaming me when you didn’t know.”
“I know that now.”
“Knowing it now doesn’t give me back those years.”
She looked down, absorbing the words without arguing them away. I felt no satisfaction. Only the tired ache of saying aloud what I had spent years swallowing to keep everyone else comfortable.
Phoebe shifted in her chair. “I didn’t know.”
“I know,” I said, meeting her eyes. “But I need you to understand—I won’t let Charles use what happened to me as another story he tells for his own convenience.”
“I don’t want that either.”
The door opened behind us.
Charles walked in without knocking.
For one suspended second, nobody moved. His gaze passed over the documents on the table, then stopped on Phoebe.
“Why are there papers out?”
Phoebe rose, one hand braced against the arm of the chair.
“Because you left them in my apartment.”
“I left a draft.”
Nora didn’t touch the pages. “Then it should be easy to confirm with the clinic.”
Charles’s eyes sharpened. “This is not a legal meeting.”
“You asked Hannah to meet you alone,” Nora said. “She declined.”
He turned to me. “You’re exploiting Phoebe’s pregnancy to reopen a divorce you already signed.”
“I’m trying to understand what happened to embryos created from my eggs.”
“Your agreement covers the past.”
“My agreement doesn’t make me forget my own signature.”
“You signed it voluntarily.”
“Yes. I did.” I held his gaze. “That doesn’t mean you bought my silence about everything you’ve done.”
Something hardened in his expression. Not guilt. Calculation, quick and familiar.
Phoebe stood between us now—not physically, but in the way her eyes kept moving from his face to mine.
“Charles,” she said, “you told me Hannah had given them to us.”
“I told you what I understood.”
“Then why didn’t you show me the consent?”
He took a step toward her. “Not here.”
“Where, then?”
He glanced at the documents again. For an instant, his calm slipped, and I saw the anger beneath it—not because I had accused him, but because I had brought other people into a conversation he’d expected to control.
“You’ve made this into a spectacle,” he said.
“No,” I replied. “You were counting on nobody asking questions.”
He turned away from us and took out his phone. His thumb moved over the screen. A moment later, mine buzzed.
A message from a cousin I hadn’t spoken to in months: Is it true you’re trying to claim Phoebe’s babies?
My stomach tightened.
May you like
Charles looked up, his face composed again.
“I’ve already told my family that you’re trying to claim Phoebe’s unborn daughters.”
