At twelve weeks, I go in for the first formal scan and intake at the Park Avenue clinic — not the one Aiden booked. A different one. Joelle picked it.
Aiden is at the door of the maternal-fetal medicine suite when I get off the elevator.
He has a baseball cap pulled down and two private-security men behind him. People in the waiting room still know exactly who he is.
I stop.
"Mr. Pell. This isn't a Pell Medical conference room."
He looks at the file folder in my hand.
"I'm coming with you to the appointment."
I go around him.
He follows me.
"Wren. I'm the father."
The word, in his mouth, in this hallway, is so absurd it has its own gravity.
I turn.
"You have it backwards. You're the man who tried to make sure there wouldn't be one."
Heads come up across the waiting room.
Aiden's face goes white.
Not from what I said.
The app pings on my phone in the same breath.
[Pregnancy reflex: hypoglycemia.]
He puts his hand against the wall and his forehead beads. One of his security men steps forward and stops because he doesn't know what to do.
I have a tin of Altoids ginger drops in my bag. I keep them on me for when my own stomach turns over. I have kept them on me for the last three years because Aiden's stomach has been bad since he was twenty-four, and I used to hand them to him at galas without breaking conversation.
My fingers close on the tin.
I take my hand out of the bag empty.
The MFM door opens and a nurse calls my name.
"Wren Marchetti."
I answer and walk in. The door closes behind me. On the other side I hear Aiden's assistant asking the receptionist whether they can get a juice from the staff fridge.
The scan goes long.
The MFM points to the screen and turns it so I can see.
"Fetal cardiac activity is excellent."
I look at the picture and my eyes start to water without my permission.
There's a commotion outside the suite door.
Celeste's voice.
"Aiden — you promised. You said the baby would not get between us."
Aiden, low. "Not at the hospital. Don't."
"It is me doing this? You go to her every day. Do you even remember why I came home."
I tuck the printout into the folder and step out into the hallway with it.
Celeste sees me and the volume cuts. She steps in front of me. Up close, in better light, the contour highlight on her cheekbones is so even it looks airbrushed.
She drops her voice.
"Wren. You have a real talent. Tying him down with a baby that doesn't even have features yet."
I look at her.
"Your saint filter just slipped."
Her face changes color.
I step past her. I get four feet down the corridor and stop and look back.
"Pick it up. Aiden hasn't looked at you enough today."
That night, Celeste swallows a bottle of Ambien in Aiden's Tribeca apartment.
Vivienne calls me before Aiden does.
"Wren. If she doesn't make it through, you are a murderer in the eyes of God."
I'm at the kitchen island with a prenatal and a glass of water.
"Call 911. Call an ambulance."
"Do you even have a conscience left."
I set the glass down.
"I don't have a medical license."
She is choking on her own breath when the line cuts.
Half an hour later, Aiden calls.
His voice is raw in a way I have never heard before.
"They pumped her stomach."
I make a small acknowledging noise.
"She left a note."
"Did she put my name in it."
"No."
"Then why are you calling me."
He breathes, long.
"She wrote that if you had not come along, we would have been together by now."
I laugh. It is not a kind laugh.
"Aiden. You're thirty-three years old. You don't still believe that line."
He doesn't answer.
I say it.
"Three years ago, when she went abroad. Was it because she was sick? Or was it because Pell Medical was about to enter Chapter 11."
The line goes completely silent.
I attach the PDF Joelle's investigator put together that afternoon and send it.
Three years ago, in the same week the SEC opened the inquiry on Pell Medical Holdings and the share price fell forty-one percent, Celeste Mowbray boarded an Air France flight to Paris. Her seatmate, business class, was not a doctor. He was an MD-PhD–turned-managing-director at a London merchant bank, who became her registered partner in Geneva four months later.
Of the eleven months she spent abroad, four days were inpatient at a clinic in Switzerland.
The rest she spent skiing at St. Moritz, sitting front row at Givenchy, and getting engaged at the top of Per Se in Manhattan.
She came home three years later only after the merchant banker terminated the engagement and Aiden Pell's company went into pre-IPO valuation.
A long time passes on Aiden's end.
He sends one line.
You knew?
I write back.
Today.
The app pings.
[Pregnancy reflex: severe emesis.]
I know it isn't morning sickness this time.
It's the version of her he has lived inside since he was nineteen, breaking up on the floor of his apartment.
Aiden, once he starts asking questions about Celeste, does not stop.
Within three days, Wes Tran is on the buzzer at my building with a manila folder under his arm.
I don't take it.
"What are you bringing me."
Wes looks at the floor.
"Mr. Pell asked me to ask you to read these. He hopes that, once you do, you'll understand that he was also lied to."
I almost laugh.
"He was lied to, so I was supposed to get on a table."
Wes is, for once, completely still.
I push the folder back toward his chest.
"Take it."
He doesn't move.
"Mrs. Marchetti. There is something I think you should know."
I look at him.
He slides a single page out of the folder. A photograph. Black and white. The doorway of a basement lab in Pupin Hall, Columbia. Two women. One of them is my mother in a white coat with her hair pulled back the way she pulled it back for benchwork. The other one I have to look at twice. She is twenty-four years younger, in a soft blue cardigan, with her hand on my mother's elbow.
Vivienne.
"In 2003, your mother's partner-somatic-sync prototype had cleared Phase-1 IRB review. A blinded copy of the protocol left her lab without authorization that fall. The Office of Research Integrity opened an inquiry. The data leak's origin was never proven on the record. Off the record, the second person in that photograph was, at the time, a postdoctoral fellow in your mother's lab. She left under sealed circumstances in early 2004."
My fingers go cold around the photograph.
"Where is the evidence."
"Mr. Pell is in possession of it."
I look at him for a long second.
"He went to investigate Celeste, and the trail walked him into his mother."
Wes does not deny it.
That night Vivienne comes to my apartment in person.
She has lost the grand manner. Two of the Greenwich security men come up with her and stand inside my living room.
"Wren. The trial backend. Hand it over."
I am on the couch.
"Mrs. Pell-Lansing. This is unlawful entry."
She laughs, once, dry.
"You think tweets protect you from me. Your mother was the smartest woman of her generation and she died on a delivery bed all the same."
My eyes come up.
She knows in the same instant I do that the sentence escaped her.
I open the voice memo on my phone.
"Keep going."
She lunges for the phone.
The front door opens on the kick.
Aiden is in the doorway in a wrinkled shirt with no jacket, and the look on his face is colder than any expression I have ever seen on it.
"Mom. What did you just say."
For the first time, in front of her son, Vivienne is at a loss for the script.
"Aiden — don't listen to her. She's been pulling on you for months —"
Aiden walks into the living room.
Each step turns him a fraction whiter. The app on my phone is going off, banner after banner.
[Pregnancy reflex: abdominal pressure.] [Pregnancy reflex: vertigo.]
I sit up. He has not put a hand on a chair.
He doesn't look at the phone.
He slaps a binder down on the coffee table in front of her.
"Theodora Marchetti's Phase-1 sync protocol was lifted out of her lab in November 2003. You commissioned it."
Vivienne's hand goes to the edge of the table.
"I did it for this family. Pell Medical was about to be liquidated. If I hadn't gotten that protocol, your father's company would have ended, and the schools you went to, and the —"
The blood in me is going cold a degree at a time.
My mother, eight months pregnant, was told by her department chair, her husband, and three peer reviewers that her data was unreproducible. Her primary investor pulled. The hospital cut her clinical partner. She walked into Lenox Hill at 3 a.m. with placental abruption and walked out of it in a body bag.
For twenty-one years I believed she had lost a fight with bad luck.
For twenty-one years she had lost a fight with the woman currently telling me she did it for family.
Vivienne keeps going.
"I didn't mean for her to die. She insisted on continuing the pregnancy. She insisted on litigating. She kept the technology in her own daughter's name. That was her mistake."
Aiden's voice arrives in pieces.
"Enough."
She turns on him.
"For her, you would turn on your own mother?"
He closes his eyes for a beat.
"Wes. Call NYPD."
She screams. Real this time.
The Greenwich men try to step in. Aiden has brought two of his own up the stairs behind him and they put themselves between Vivienne's detail and Wes's phone.
The sirens come up Hudson.
On her way out, with one of the officers' hands on her elbow, Vivienne looks at me.
"Wren Marchetti. Don't get comfortable. There is Pell blood in your stomach. You will never be free of us."
I stand up. My hand is on the back of the couch.
"Not for long, no."
Aiden turns to me. Sharp.
I lay an embossed folder down on the coffee table. The cover sheet is in Joelle's letterhead. EMBRYO PARENTAGE AGREEMENT — MARCHETTI, W. / PELL, A.
"What does that mean."
"It means this child was conceived through legal assisted reproduction. The oocyte is from my mother's cryopreserved bank at the Columbia Fertility Center, which she froze for me in 2004. The sperm is from an anonymous donor at California Cryobank, vial 41-7710. The parentage agreement, which you e-signed in our second year of marriage along with the other quarterly compliance packets you never read, names me as the sole legal parent."