Paige flinched at that, actually flinched, like the sentence had physically struck her.
“That’s not fair,” she said. “I’m not saying I don’t love her. I’m saying I don’t know who I’m loving right now, and that terrifies me more than I know how to explain.”
“Then be terrified quietly,” I said. “Until we actually know something. Don’t say it out loud in front of her.”
Dr. Osei returned twenty minutes later, a folder in her hands, her face carefully neutral in the specific way medical professionals go neutral right before delivering something terrible.
“I’ve spoken with the lab director at Bellmont Fertility,” she said. “There was an embryo labeling error three days before your transfer, Renata. Two patient files were briefly mismatched during a system update.”
“Briefly,” I repeated. “How briefly?”
Dr. Osei glanced down at her folder, as if the exact number of minutes might somehow soften what she was about to say.
“Long enough,” Dr. Osei said. “The embryo transferred into you belonged genetically to Bridget and Theo Kavanagh. Not to Paige and Desmond.”
The room absorbed that sentence the way a house absorbs a sudden crack of thunder, every wall seeming to shift slightly at once.
“And our embryo?” Paige asked, barely audible.
“Was transferred into their surrogate,” Dr. Osei said. “A woman named Yolanda Reyes. She’s currently thirty-nine weeks along, at a different hospital across town.”
Desmond made a small, strangled sound, somewhere between a laugh and something closer to grief.
I felt the floor tilt slightly under me.
“So somewhere across town,” I said slowly, “there’s a woman about to give birth to my sister’s biological child.”
“Yes,” Dr. Osei said quietly. “I’m very sorry. This should never have happened.”
“How does something like this even happen?” I asked. “You’re a fertility clinic. This is your entire job.”
Dr. Osei’s jaw tightened, the particular tension of someone forced to defend an institution she was clearly furious with herself.
“A software migration,” she said. “Patient identification numbers were temporarily duplicated across two files during a system update. It should have been caught in the manual verification step. It wasn’t.”
“Someone didn’t do their job,” I said.
“Someone made a catastrophic error,” Dr. Osei agreed. “I won’t defend it. I can only tell you what we know now, and help however I can from here.”
“Whose responsibility was the manual verification step?” I asked. “Specifically.”
“A technician,” Dr. Osei said. “She’s been placed on leave pending the full investigation. I won’t share more than that right now, out of fairness to a process that’s still ongoing.”
I didn’t have anything left to say to that, the anger in me momentarily outpaced by sheer exhaustion.
Paige started crying, the kind of crying that comes from shock more than grief, still too early for grief to have fully arrived yet.
“I need to see her,” Paige said. “Our real baby. I need to be there.”
I flinched at the phrase “our real baby,” even though I understood, logically, exactly what she meant by it.
“We’ll help arrange that,” Dr. Osei said. “In the meantime, I understand this is an enormous amount to process, for everyone in this room.”
She looked at me, at the baby still held tight against my chest.
