The Lab Tech

The lab tech's name was Priya, and she agreed to meet Nora at a 24-hour diner because her shift ended at eleven and she hadn't eaten since noon.

She ordered fries and didn't touch them. She kept turning her phone face-down on the table, then flipping it back over, checking the time.

"I can lose my job for this," Priya said.

"I know."

"I mean it. Not lose-my-job-find-another-one. Lose my license. There's a difference."

Nora had brought a printout — her own copy of the March results, the one her actual doctor had given her, folded so many times in her purse over the past three hours that the crease had gone soft and gray. She slid it across the table, next to the ketchup bottle, careful to keep it out of the ring of condensation left by Priya's water glass.

"This is what I got in March," Nora said. "This is what was on the screen tonight." She turned her phone around, the photo she'd taken of the gala screen before security asked her to leave the ballroom. Same name. Same date. Different diagnosis code.

Priya looked at both for a long time. Long enough that Nora's coffee went from hot to lukewarm sitting untouched in front of her.

"Codes don't get typo'd like this," Priya finally said. "This isn't a mistake somebody made in a hurry. Somebody opened your file after it left Riverside and changed one line. Whoever did it knew exactly what field to touch."

"Can you tell who?"

"Not from a photo of a screen, no. I'd need the actual chart history. Access logs." Priya pushed her fries around without eating any. "That's not something I can just pull for a stranger at a diner."

"I'm not asking you to pull it for a stranger. I'm asking you to pull it for me."

Priya's jaw tightened. Outside the window, a delivery truck idled too long, its brakes hissing every few seconds like it was breathing. "You're Kane's wife. The one from the news thing tonight."

"I'm Kane's wife for about another six weeks, from what I can tell."

"Look —" Priya lowered her voice, even though the diner was nearly empty, just a trucker two booths down asleep against the window. "I'll look. I'm not promising anything. If it comes back clean, if it really was just a lab error, I'm telling you that and you leave it alone."

"Deal."

Priya finally ate a fry, cold by now, and made a face at it like she'd forgotten fries were supposed to taste like something. She pulled a napkin toward her and wrote a number on it in pen that skipped twice before it caught. "Burner. Don't call my regular line again after tonight. If anyone at Riverside finds a text thread between us, I lose more than my license."

"Understood."

"I mean it, Nora." It was the first time Priya had used her name instead of *Mrs. Kane* or *you*, and something about hearing it said plain, without the weight of a title attached, made Nora's throat tighten in a way the whole rest of the night hadn't managed.

Nora didn't believe it would come back clean. She'd read her own body for six weeks now. Exhaustion hit her by two every afternoon, hard enough that she'd started locking her office door to nap on the floor for twenty minutes at a stretch. Coffee had gone metallic overnight, undrinkable, though she kept ordering it out of habit and pouring most of it down the sink. A missed period she hadn't told a single person about. Not even the doctor at the second clinic, the one across town where she'd used her maiden name on the intake form out of an instinct she couldn't explain to herself yet, some animal caution that had kicked in before her brain caught up to why. She knew what "barren" meant, and she knew it wasn't true, and there was a difference between knowing something and being able to prove it to three hundred people who'd already made up their minds.

She got home a little after midnight. Adrian was in the study, jacket off, tie loose, a glass of something amber sweating a ring onto his desk without a coaster under it — a habit his mother would've corrected in him if she'd been in the room, and Nora almost laughed at the pettiness of noticing that, tonight of all nights.

"Where were you?" he said.

"Does it matter?"

"I was worried."

"You were worried." Nora set her purse down on the arm of the couch. Her shoes were still wet through from standing under the awning. Her feet had gone numb somewhere around eleven and were starting to sting now that she was inside and warm. "Your mother put my medical file on a screen the size of a garage door in front of the entire board, Adrian. And you're worried about where I was."

"I didn't know she was going to do it tonight. I told you that."

"You keep saying tonight like the problem is the timing." Nora crossed the room. The desk drawer closest to Adrian's elbow was open an inch, just enough that she could see a manila folder inside, tab facing up. She almost didn't look. She was tired, and her feet hurt, and she wanted a shower more than she wanted another fight.

But the tab had a name on it. Not hers.

*LANG, V. — CANDIDATE FILE.*

"What is that," Nora said. It wasn't a question by the time it left her mouth.

Adrian followed her eyes to the drawer, and something happened to his face — not guilt exactly, something closer to a man watching a wall he'd built collapse slower than he expected, brick by brick, with him still standing behind it.

"Nora —"

She pulled the folder out before he could stop her. Photographs clipped to the inside cover. A woman, blond, early twenties, smiling at some other event, some other party Nora had never attended. Beneath the photos, a typed page. Family background. Education. Health history — the word *fertile* circled in blue ink, twice underlined, like someone had wanted to make very sure the point landed.

The date at the top of the page was from February.

A full month before Nora had ever gotten her own March results back. A full month before any of this was supposed to exist yet, on paper or anywhere else.

She read the date twice, sure she'd misread it the first time. She hadn't. Her thumb had left a damp print on the corner of the page from how hard she was gripping it, and she made herself loosen her hand before the paper creased.

"This is dated before the gala," Nora said. "Before my results. Before any of it." Her voice had gone very quiet, quieter than it had been all night, quieter than it had been standing in front of the whole board with a fake diagnosis lit up behind her. "You were already looking at replacements, Adrian. Before you even had a reason."