“Do you mind my asking what kind of procedure you underwent with Dr. Sherman? Was it in vitro?”
“Oh, we’d be here all night if I described everything,” Alexis said. She was forcing such a hard, fake smile it looked as if her cheeks would burst. “At first I did intrauterine insemination, sometimes fondly known as the turkey-baster method, except they really use a plastic catheter to shoot the sperm up inside you. Then there were the hormone cocktails I had to inject in my belly. And let’s not forget the progesterone suppositories. Lovely. Then we proceeded to IVF.”
“You’re so young. What was the problem?”
“I had cysts on my ovaries—which came as a complete and utter shock. Not only had there never been any symptoms, but I’d gotten pregnant easily several years before. As it turns out, my first pregnancy had pretty much defied the laws of probability—and the chances of it happening again naturally were next to nil.”
Instinctively Lake’s eyes flicked around the room, searching for a sign of the child. On top of a mahogany side table at the far end of the couch was a silver-framed photograph of a toddler, about fifteen months old. From where she sat Lake couldn’t make out the child’s features, but it was impossible to miss the halo of hair so blond it was nearly white.
“Yes,” Alexis said, catching the movement. “My daughter Charlotte.”
“And she’s about three now?” Lake said. But as she spoke the words, an eerie feeling enveloped her. There was no other evidence of the child anywhere.
“No,” Alexis said. “She died of meningitis when she was eighteen months old.”
The words hit Lake like a punch to the stomach.
“I’m terribly sorry,” she said.
“Do you have children?”
“Two.”
Alexis stared at Lake, her eyes suddenly wide and blank. For a brief moment she looked like a character on a horror-movie poster, a mother whose children have been abducted by aliens or lured away forever by gremlins hiding in the cracks of the floorboards.
“Then you can at least imagine what it would be like,” Alexis said. “Honestly, a few people actually suggested that my grief must not be so bad because Charlotte wasn’t really a person yet.”
“How terrible,” Lake said. “I—I assume you were never successful in having another child?”
“Very good guess,” Alexis said, flashing the evil grin again. “Oh, Dr. Sherman insisted I would be. I had plenty of eggs—in his words, a virtual plethora of healthy eggs—and it was just a matter of time getting one of our test-tube embryos to implant in my uterus. After the fourth attempt I was ready to try another clinic but Sherman practically insisted we stay. He just knew it would happen. So I stupidly gave him one more chance—and then another. It was all an utter failure.”
“But why not try another clinic now? They each have different areas of expertise. Maybe you’d have luck at one of the bigger ones affiliated with a medical center.”
“I was going to start someplace else—at Cornell, as a matter of fact. But then my husband ran for the hills. He didn’t find fertility treatment all that fun, though it’s hard to imagine why. Stabbing a needle in my ass every night, watching me fatten up like Jabba the Hut on the drugs and then turn into a screaming maniac. What’s not to like?”
Lake almost winced.
“What about having a child without your husband?” Lake asked. “Did the clinic freeze any of your embryos?”
“There were extra embryos—plenty of them—but Brian wouldn’t give me permission to use them. He found someone else. So the last thing he wanted was a baby with me.”
Lake bit her lip, thinking. She needed to nail down Alexis’s specific complaint.
“When you told Archer’s office that the clinic was exploiting people, did you mean because they pushed you to have treatments that had little chance of working?”
Alexis eyed her guardedly. The wariness was back.
“Partly,” she answered.
“Was there anything else? Did they ever—um—overcharge you, for instance?”
Alexis stared at Lake quietly for a moment, her whole body still.
“I’ve shared an awful lot of information with you,” Alexis said finally. “And I don’t have anything else to tell you.”
Then she shot up from her chair, indicating that it was time for Lake to leave.
“But I want to help,” Lake said, rising too. “I really do.”
“You say you want to help, but you refuse to tell me your real agenda,” Alexis said, marching out of the living room with Lake in tow.
Lake started to protest, but she could see that it was