“Doesn’t matter.” Terry could hear the doctor drinking tea or coffee or something while they talked. “All the antiseptic procedure in the world doesn’t always prevent. Fact is, we were introducing foreign objects into your body. Probably picked up something on the way in. So you have an infection. I’m going to call in a prescription for antibiotics. And a cream for the vaginitis you’re bound to get from the medicine. I want you to pick up the medications and go home. Now.”

“But other than the fever I feel…”

“Now Terry. Seriously. You underwent surgery and you have a complication. I’m your doctor and I’m telling you to go home and rest.”

Terry complied. She read the pharmacy phone number into Dr. Goldstein’s ear, and she informed her supervisor that she had to leave work. She went to the bathroom again, endured the rasp of soft cloth on her fevered skin, and was so spacy that she dozed off while sitting on the toilet. Thoughts of her gone lover and her flushed baby. Her son. Terry somehow knows the fetus had been male.

Edward isn’t really gone. He’s right where he always was, to the left and down the corridor from her work area, twenty years older than she, twenty tiers higher in the company, married, black, and now frightened of her. As unavailable as if he were dead. There was no way she could have borne the baby. Not in her family.

The woman Terry calls “Mom” is really her aunt. Her biological unwed mother Norah had her at seventeen, and Norah’s older sister and husband took little Teresa and raised her as their own. The world knows her as Terry O’Brien, daughter of Colin and Peggy, but she is really the bastard offspring of Norah Halloran and some nameless guy from some degenerate party.

Terry knows and loves her Aunt Norah, who is really her mom, and who hasn’t yet married. Norah had a second child, a son, when she was nineteen, Terry’s biological half-brother Guy, but he was raised as her cousin by her other aunt, Colleen.

That’s how Terry’s Catholic family handled illegitimacy: by intrafamily adoption.

There was no way Terry could have brought a mixed race infant into that stew. She couldn’t tell her aunt (mother) about the abortion, but she did confide in her mother (aunt). Norah would have insisted on raising the baby (she thought the family owed her an infant), and Terry couldn’t have endured that or a continuing relationship with Edward.

She tried to shake herself alert on the toilet. She looked at her watch. She’d only drifted for a minute or so. She rose, carefully pulled her clothes about her, and left the bathroom and the building at about ten forty-five.

The streets of the financial district seemed strange to her. Less crowded than at morning, noon and quitting time, but with more shoppers. A sea of strollers and carriages with children in them, and even some small dogs on designer leashes. Terry felt woozy and sleepy and wished she had Edward to lean on, but he was gone and their baby was gone. She didn’t regret her decision, but she felt sorry for the baby who wouldn’t be born. She had hated the dreadful waiting from the time she knew she was pregnant till the embryo was big enough to remove, feeling her body prepare for something that wouldn’t happen. She felt sad and weary, in need of sex or support or both.