with pity before they could stop themselves. Marlow’s parents waved it away: they swore her blue eyes were shaped like her father’s brown ones, that Floss’s hair had been just like Marlow’s—untamed and ashy—at her age. Marlow had never thought much of it. She knew that, back in the twentieth century, Americans would list the things in their bloodstreams proudly—I’m a quarter Irish, half-Ugandan, part French—but people never did that anymore. The fractions had gotten too complicated by the time Marlow was born, and the children who came after her had even more heritage to keep track of: noses and brows and chins were less predictable, less indicative of any one thing. Still, Marlow wondered on occasion where her parents’ features were hiding. Sometimes she played a game in front of mirrors, jerking her head up before her face could prepare itself, hoping to catch a glimpse of her mother or her father. It never worked. When her dad was gone, there would be nothing in her reflection to remind her of him.
Maybe, she thought suddenly, with a pang of guilt, she could be a bit like Ellis, and see potential in this child. An opportunity to save her father’s face—to start it over, really. She would get to see it younger than she had the first time. If she lived long enough, she might even see it again the way she did in her favorite memory of theirs. She pictured it now: the day he taught her how to ride a bike, jogging alongside her unicorn two-wheeler with the end of a rope in his hand. The other end was tied around Marlow’s waist—a compromise. She wanted him not to hold her; he couldn’t let go just yet. “Sweetheart, look where you’re going,” he kept saying. “Look straight ahead.” But she felt better looking at his face, at his hair flopping wildly as he trailed her. She could still see it now, the sweat at his temples, the crinkles in his eyes as he laughed with her, at her.
How old was her father in this memory? She asked her device to do the math, and the solution gave her an existential jolt: Twenty-eight. Seven years younger than she was now.
“Oh, Anna,” her father said suddenly, weakly, his voice pushing through the phlegm of many speechless hours. “You’re all right.”
Marlow didn’t know who Anna was, but she’d come to feel familiar with her. Her father called her by the name roughly a third of the time. The rest of the time, he didn’t call her anything. Marlow didn’t correct him, now—he sounded so relieved. She just nodded, retucked his blanket, and focused on looking that way: all right.
* * *
She and Ellis struck a deal: the boy he wanted, with her father’s face. They messaged the Liberty center, and someone replied that the designers would start the mock-up right away.
The last days before her sowing passed in a heady blur. Floss got into a fight with the caterer that ended in brief, light shoving. Bridget threw a fit regarding the carbon implications of the cake Floss had ordered from the other side of the country. Marlow hung her yellow dress at her mother’s house, where she wouldn’t have to look at it. She attended her hen party, a spa day planned by Jacqueline. The women were all subdued because hen parties were always dry; the mother-to-be had to abstain, so everyone else did, too. “Buck up, losers,” Jacqueline snapped, stamping her foot in the pedicure tub. “At least we can talk about Tia behind her back.” Tia was the only one from their group who wasn’t at the party. Childless women were never invited.
“You guys must have talked a lot about me over the years,” Marlow said. Everyone laughed nervously.
The morning of the sowing, Marlow sat at her mother’s kitchen table, sipping hot water with lemon. Ahead of her egg replacement, they had finally cut off her coffee. Through the glass doors that led to the backyard, she watched drones lower gold-painted chairs into the grass as a writer and exec from the network looked on. The backdrop that her son’s face would be projected on had already been unrolled from a bar high over the lawn. Around her, inside, three bots were in high gear. One steamed Marlow’s dress in the hallway, one chopped fruit at the island, and a third dropped tea lights into wide bowls of water. They were all client-facing—it was a special occasion. People didn’t