quality fertilized embryos to freeze for later. And none taking up residence in my womb.
“We know implantation is not impossible,” Dr. Akhtar said to me during one of my checkups. “But I’m not seeing the results I’d like, and I think…” She cleared her throat. “Have you considered outside help?”
I’d blinked. “Another specialist?”
She shook her head. “Another sperm sample,” she said.
“Oh,” I said, taken aback. “No. I don’t think so. It’s not at that point yet, right? It hasn’t been that long.”
“Nicholas’s numbers aren’t where I’d like them to be, and sperm donation can have very successful results in—”
“No,” I said firmly. “We’ve got this. We’re a team. It’ll work out.”
Dr. Akhtar looked at me skeptically. The truth was that I couldn’t bring myself to make Nick feel as cruddy and self-defeating about this as I already did. Not yet. It felt too early to ring that alarm, not without turning over any other stones, so I crossed my fingers and we made her prescribed lifestyle changes to improve Nick’s samples. He took aspartic acid and vitamin C. He exercised more and stopped watching TV or looking at his phone after 9:00 p.m., in the hope of a fuller night’s sleep. He tried zinc. Fenugreek. Vitamin D. I’d already cut out alcohol, but now we both did, and eliminated caffeine as well.
“It seems unfair that this is causing us this much stress, yet we can’t have either of our favorite coping mechanisms for dealing with said stress,” he’d said to me.
“Tell me about it,” I said, blowing my nose and rubbing it red. “I’m not even taking anything for hay fever, in case.”
The one thing that did help was Gaz, who’d become a huge fan favorite on his first season of Ready, Set, Bake, in part because of how hard he wept: for his successes, for his failures, for the contestants who went home. Of which, sadly, he was one, bowing out in the fifth week after—of all things—he burned the puff pastry on a game pie. (He had sequestered himself for three weeks to grieve, at which point we stormed over to his flat with a bag of groceries and forced him to cook himself out of the darkness. He redid the pie to resounding success.) There was an entire Instagram account called The Gaztronomics, devoted to photos and GIFs and fan art and fun facts people dug up about him, including that he’d once punched the now Duke of Clarence in the jaw. (Which he had, but only to keep Nick from decking a paparazzo.)
“What does it say about me that this made him go up in people’s estimation?” Nick wondered.
“That you’re very impressive and huge and that only a superhero could level you,” Freddie replied.
“Good answer,” Nick said.
“Or that they think you’re a miserable git who deserved it,” Freddie said. “But surely it’s the first one.”
Gaz had been so popular that when the baking stalwart decided to do a fan favorite season, Gaz was the first call, and he’d come prepared. The show taped each episode over one weekend in the country and then aired it a few days later, so Gaz had holed up in his office or his flat working and cooking in alternate bursts as he baked his way through each round (and successfully defended the Oxford Street branch of Boots from a slip-and-fall accusation), including a dizzying Desserts Week in which his rum-raisin cheesecake had been par excellence, his chocolate roulade had been an absolute nightmare, and his croquembouche had enough bouche to scrape him through. By the end, it was him, a young mother named Marian, and a seventy-year-old named Wayne, who Gaz told us had a much younger boyfriend who’d refused to go on camera because he thought Wayne was more sympathetic if he seemed lonely.
The tent they erected for filming moved each season, and was currently parked on Annabelle Farthing’s enormous Somerset lawns, which come finale time would get their locational due and a boost of tourism. When Nick read about this coincidence in a fawning article about Annabelle’s conservation work on behalf of a rare crocus, he got what he considered a great brainwave: having Annabelle smuggle us into the finale garden party to congratulate or console Gaz in person.
“No,” I said. “We are not asking that woman for anything.”
“She owes me one,” Nick pointed out. “And she’ll make sure we’re protected.”
“While I would love to cash in on Annabelle’s theoretical guilty conscience, this will never work,” I said.