Chapter 10: The Story Goes Public
The interview clip reached me before I’d finished my coffee.
My aunt sent it first, with a message that read, You need to see this. Then my office manager forwarded the same link. By the time I tapped it, Grant’s face was already appearing on my feed between weather alerts and a video of someone’s dog.
He sat beneath studio lights, his wedding ring gone, his expression arranged into the calm sorrow he used when he wanted other people to mistake control for honesty.
The interviewer asked about the clinic’s recovered records. Grant spoke of possible errors, old systems, and a family dragged into a painful situation. He never mentioned the result he’d received years ago. He never mentioned that he had known.
Instead, he spoke of “questions about the timeline” and said Jocelyn had made choices that hurt people who trusted her.
He didn’t say Noah’s name. He didn’t need to. The implication hung there, polished and unmistakable: Jocelyn had been unfaithful, and Grant was the injured man trying to protect his family.
Then he turned the story toward me.
“My former wife has unresolved feelings about the divorce,” he said. “I can understand that. But it’s wrong to use a clinic’s mistake to settle a personal grievance.”
I stopped the video.
For a few seconds, I could hear only the refrigerator humming and the coffee cooling in my hand. The old reflex rose in me—open every message, post every record, make the truth so loud he couldn’t step around it.
My aunt called while I was still holding the phone.
“Tell them everything,” she said. “The report, the test, all of it. He’s counting on you staying quiet.”
“He’s counting on me being angry,” I said.
“He lied about you.”
“I know.”
“Then don’t let him get away with it.”
After the call, I opened my fertility notebook. My handwriting from those years leaned forward across the pages, tight and careful, as if neatness could make uncertainty behave. Dates. Questions for appointments. A list of tests I thought I’d failed to complete.
Underneath them, in the margin of one page, I’d written: Maybe I’m the reason.
I closed the notebook before the words could pull me backward.
Dr. Keller returned my call on the second ring. His voice was gentle, but there was no softness in what he said.
“You can speak about your own records and your own experience,” he told me. “But you can’t use Noah’s private test to defend yourself. And Grant’s medical information isn’t yours to release.”
“I understand.”
“I know you do. I’m saying it because the interview was designed to make you answer in a way that exposes more than you intend.”
My grip tightened around the phone. “So what can I say?”
“What you own. What you can document. If Jocelyn chooses to speak, that has to be her choice. The clinic can authenticate records through the proper process, but I can’t give you someone else’s private information to make your case.”
He didn’t sound like a man hiding behind rules. He sounded like someone trying to keep a child from becoming an argument adults could pass back and forth.
That distinction mattered.
“I won’t use Noah to prove anything,” I said.
When we hung up, the interview had already been clipped into shorter pieces. One showed Grant looking down as he described betrayal. Another ended on the phrase “personal grievance,” with my name nowhere in the caption and my identity clear to anyone who knew him.
My aunt sent a second message: Please don’t let him rewrite what happened.
I typed, I won’t.
Then I deleted it. It sounded like a promise to fight on his terms.
Instead, I laid out the records I had authorization to use: the portal audit concerning my own account, the dates in my notebook, and the clinic’s confirmation that the audit had been preserved. None of them could tell the whole story by themselves. Together, they showed that an appointment had been canceled through my account during a session associated with Grant’s laptop, and that a message falsely recorded me declining further testing.
The records didn’t prove whose hands had been on the keyboard.
I would not pretend they did.
I would not publish Grant’s diagnosis. I would not confirm or deny what the test said about Noah. If Jocelyn chose to tell the truth about what she had done, that would be hers to authorize—not a weapon I took from her because I was furious.
The choice left me with less to say than I wanted. It also left Noah out of the blast radius.
My phone rang again. Jocelyn.
I answered but didn’t speak first.
“I saw the interview,” she said. Her voice was thin with exhaustion. Somewhere behind her, a child’s cartoon chimed and sang.
“So did I.”
“He made me sound like I—” She stopped. “I don’t even know how to finish that sentence without making Noah part of it.”
“You don’t have to.”
A small pause. “I’m not going to let him use Noah to make me sign his version.”
I looked at the closed notebook beside the records. “Then don’t sign anything you haven’t read.”
“I wouldn’t.”
Her voice shifted. A doorbell rang, faintly, at her end of the call.
She went quiet.
“Jocelyn?”
“There’s someone at the door.” I heard footsteps, then the muted scrape of a latch. “It’s a courier.”
My stomach tightened. “What does he want?”
“He says Grant sent a statement for me.” Paper rustled near the phone. Her breath caught. “He needs me to sign it.”
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I heard Noah ask something in the background, too softly to make out.
Jocelyn lowered her voice. “Laurel, it’s addressed to me—and it says I have to sign before the interview airs again.”
