“Are you sad that you had to make this decision?”

Who wasn’t? Joy thought. What hellish tributary of evolution had made reproduction—and all the shit that came with it—the woman’s job? She thought about all the women who had sat in the very chair she was in, and the stories that had brought them here, and how, for one brief chapter, they all intersected. A sisterhood of desperation.

The woman took a Kleenex from a box that Harriet offered her. “Sometimes we have to make choices when we don’t like any of the options,” the nurse said. She drew the woman into an embrace. “You’ve been here long enough. I can get your driver if you’re ready to go.”

A few minutes later the woman was signed out. A boy (he really was no more than that) stood awkwardly beside her as she got up and started to walk down the hall. He put his hand on her shoulder, but she shrugged it off, and Joy watched them until she couldn’t see them anymore, moving in tandem with six fixed inches of distance between them.

Joy put in her earbuds and filled her head with music. Had anyone asked, she would have said she was listening to Beyoncé or Lana Del Rey, but the truth was she was listening to music from The Little Mermaid. At one of her foster homes, she had been given that CD as a birthday gift and had memorized every last word of it. When things got really bad, she used to put the pillow over her head and whisper the lyrics.

Wouldn’t you think I’m a girl, a girl who has everything?

“Miz Joy?” the nurse said. “Let’s get some vitals.” She came and stood beside Joy’s oversize armchair in the recovery room.

Joy let Harriet stick the thermometer into her mouth and Velcro the cuff around her arm. She watched the red numbers blink on the machine, proof that her body, battered as it was, was still functional. “One-ten over seventy-five, and ninety-eight point six,” the nurse said. “Normal.”

Normal.

Nothing was normal.

The whole world had changed.

She had had two hearts, and now she did not.

She had been a mother, and now she was not.

—

GEORGE SAT IN HIS TRUCK, his hands fisted on the steering wheel, going nowhere. The ignition was off, and he had two choices. He could start the engine again and drive back home and pretend he’d never come. Or he could finish what he’d started.

He was breathing heavily, like he’d run here, instead of driving hundreds of miles to distance himself from a truth he couldn’t absorb.

He thought about how he and Lil had once been part of a Thirty Days for Life vigil with the church: where the congregation took shifts round the clock huddled in a prayer circle in front of the state capitol. They had brought blankets and lawn chairs and thermoses of hot chocolate and had held hands and asked Jesus to help lawmakers see the right path. Lil had been a child—maybe eight or nine—and she and some other kids in the congregation had run around while the adults prayed. He could remember watching them spell out their names with sparklers in the dark, and thinking this was what the movement for life was all about.

How could Lil have gotten an abortion?

She had to have been pressured. Someone here must have told her this was the right thing, the only thing, to do. She couldn’t have possibly believed that he wouldn’t have helped her, raised the child, done anything she wanted.

In the back of his mind was a thought like a worm in the core of an apple: what if this was what she wanted?

George didn’t believe it; he couldn’t. She was a good girl, because he had been a good father.

If the first half of that statement wasn’t true, didn’t it negate the second half?

Lil had accepted Jesus Christ as her Lord and Savior. She knew that life began at conception. She could probably rattle off five Bible verses proving it. She was kind, generous, beautiful, smart, and everyone fell in love with her when they met her. Lil was, quite simply, the one instance of perfection in George’s life.

He realized, of course, that everyone was a sinner. But if there was any splinter of evil in his daughter, he knew where it had come from.

Him.

George, who had spent nearly two decades trying to scrub clean the stains from his soul by giving himself to the church. George, who had been told forgiveness was divine; that God loved him no matter what. What if all that had been a lie?

George shook his head clear. It was this simple: something terrible had happened; someone was to blame for it. This was a test from God. Like the one Job faced. And Abraham. He was being asked to prove his devotion to his faith, and to his daughter, and he knew exactly what was expected of him.

He slipped on his coat and zipped it up halfway. Then he took the pistol out of the glove compartment and tucked it into his waistband, concealing it beneath the fleece. His pockets were already full of ammunition.

He started sweating almost immediately, but then again, it was easily eighty degrees outside. He began moving toward the hazard-orange building. It was garish, a scar on the cityscape. George ducked his head, pulled his collar up.

There was a fence around the Center, and on that perimeter was a cluster of protesters. They held up signs. There was a woman sitting in a folding chair, knitting; and a big man holding a sandwich in one hand and a baby doll in another. George thought about Lil. He wondered if he was walking the same path she had.

A Black woman was leaving the clinic. Her husband or boyfriend had his arm around her. As they passed the protesters, he folded her more protectively into the shell of his body. He crossed paths with the couple, and kept walking. The big man eating the sandwich called out to him. “Brother,” he said, “save your baby!”

George continued to the front door of the Center, thinking, I will.

—

OUT OF SHEER BOREDOM, Wren was eavesdropping.

“Dr. Ward’s been at it since nine-thirty,” Vonita was saying. “We had a fifteen-week come in for Cytotec this morning and she’s in the back now.”

“All that while I was sitting home eating bonbons?” The girl with pink hair laughed.

“Bonbons,” Vonita sighed. “I wish.” She took a sip from her tumbler.

“What’s in there?”

“I hope it’s the ground-up bones of supermodels,” Vonita said sourly. “This crap is the work of the devil.”

“Why do you even drink that garbage?”

Vonita gestured to her generous curves. “Because of my torrid love affair with food.”

Aunt Bex stood up. “I think I’m growing roots,” she said, starting to walk in small circles. “How long can it take to give someone a prescription?” Wren watched her lift her arms over her head, bend at the waist, and do it over again.

Oh my God. Her aunt was doing old-person yoga in public.

A buzzer hummed on the reception desk, and Vonita glanced up over her reading glasses. “Now who does this one belong to?” she mused.

Wren craned her neck. The glass window in the door of the Center was specially made, so that they could see out but whoever was on the outside could not see in. She glimpsed a middle-aged man squinting into the mirrored surface.

She heard a click, the buzz of a lock being released, like Wren had seen in movies about New York apartments. “Can I help you?” Vonita said.

About a year ago, Wren and her father had been driving a deserted road near Chunky, Mississippi, when suddenly all the hair stood up on the back of her neck. The next minute, a doe had bolted from the woods and slammed into the car. They had been hit hard enough for the airbags to deploy and for the windshield to shatter. It was the one truly prescient moment of her life.

Until now.

Wren felt a shiver of electricity, the brush of an invisible icy finger. “What did you do to my baby?” the man said, and then the air around her cracked into pieces.

She fell to the floor, covering her ears. It was as if her body had reacted on instinct, while her brain was still struggling to catch up. She couldn’t see Vonita anymore, but there was a pool of blood spreading where the reception desk met the floor.

Wren tried to will herself to move, but she was frozen in ice, she was trapped in tar.

“Wren,” Aunt Bex cried, reaching out her hand.

To pull her up? To drag her out the door? To embrace her?

Wren didn’t know. Because then her aunt’s eyes went wide, and she was struck with a bullet. She tumbled to the floor as Wren scrambled closer, screaming, her hands shaking as they hovered over the bright blood on her aunt’s blouse.

Aunt Bex’s eyes were wide. Her mouth was open, but Wren couldn’t hear any sound coming out.

She read her aunt’s lips. Wren. Wren. Wren.

Then she realized what her aunt was actually saying.

Run.

—