The Careful Ones — The Argument
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Bridget told her brother on a Tuesday in November, over the phone, because she thought it would be easier than in person. It wasn't.
Patrick was quiet for longer than she expected. She could hear him breathing. She could hear the particular quality of silence that meant he was choosing his words, which he did when he was upset and didn't want to be, or when he was upset and wanted to be precise about why.
"So you just... picked one," he said.
"We selected the healthiest embryo. Yes."
"Based on what?"
"Genetic markers. Disease risk. Standard stuff."
"And?"
She hadn't planned to tell him about the other part. She'd rehearsed the call — standing in the bathroom with the door closed, Connor downstairs, mouthing the words to herself in the mirror and hating that she was mouthing words to herself in the mirror. She'd planned to say: we did IVF, we had genetic screening, we're pregnant, it's early but we're hopeful. Clean, clinical, complete. The and was not part of the plan.
"And some trait estimates. Predictive scores. They're not — it's not exact, Patrick."
"But you used them."
"Everyone uses them."
"That's not an argument."
Connor was in the kitchen. She could hear the tap. She turned away from the hallway and lowered her voice. "I'm not looking for a debate. I called to tell you we're pregnant."
"I know. And I'm — I am happy for you, genuinely. I just—" He stopped. Started again. "Mum had depression. Dad had that heart thing. You've had anxiety since you were seventeen. Did you screen for those?"
"The mood markers, yes. The cardiac stuff."
"And you found an embryo without them."
"One with a lower risk profile. Yes."
Silence. She could feel him assembling something. Patrick had always been like this — slow to react, fast to understand, and the gap between those two things was where the danger was, because by the time he spoke he'd already thought it through further than you had.
"I had anxiety," Patrick said. "You know that's how I know when something's wrong. That's how I know when you're not okay. You call me because I understand that particular shape of not-okay, and I understand it because I have it too."
"That's not — Patrick, that's not how genetics works."
"No, I know. I know that." His voice had gone flat. Not cold. Flat in the way a lake goes flat before weather changes — still, but loaded. "I just think there's something you're treating as a defect that maybe isn't one. And I think you've made a decision that you're not able to unmake, and I don't know what I'm supposed to do with that."
She didn't answer.
"Like — if I'm honest. If I'm being really honest with you. What I hear is that you looked at a list of possible children, and one of them might have been like me, and you chose a different one."
"That's not—"
"I know it's not what you meant."
"It's really not."
"But it is what happened. At some level. Isn't it? You had a list, and there were markers for the thing I have, and you moved on to the next line."
The tap was still running in the kitchen. Connor was washing something. The ordinariness of it was unbearable.
"I love you," Patrick said. "I'll be there. I'm going to be a great uncle. I just — needed to say it once."
They talked for another twenty minutes about other things. The pregnancy, the due date, whether she'd find out the sex. By the end it was almost normal. Patrick asked about Connor's job. She asked about his flatmate. They laughed about something their mother had said. The laugh was real.
She didn't mention it to Connor. He asked who called; she said Patrick, said he was happy for them. Connor smiled and went back to the dishes.
She sat with it the way you sit with things you can't say out loud.
• • •
The baby was a girl. They hadn't planned for that — the profiles included sex, but they'd deliberately not looked, and somehow they'd both assumed boy, for no reason either of them could defend. They named her Ada.
She was small and furious and fed badly for three weeks and then suddenly didn't. Bridget sat up with her at two in the morning watching her sleep and felt something that had no useful name — something too large for the word love and too specific for the word joy and too frightened for the word happiness.
She thought about the profile. Estimated cognitive range: 115–131. Emotional regulation: elevated. She hadn't known what elevated meant at the time and had decided it sounded positive. Now she thought about what elevated emotional regulation might mean in a child who was small and furious and insisted on things. Would it mean calm? Would it mean contained? Would it mean something that looked like calm from outside and felt like something else from within?
She thought about Patrick.
He'd come to the hospital. He'd held Ada with the careful intensity of someone who wanted to get it right. He'd said she's perfect and meant it. He hadn't mentioned the phone call. Neither had she. It sat between them like a piece of furniture they both walked around without looking at.
At three in the morning, Ada woke and made a sound — not crying, something pre-verbal and urgent — and Bridget picked her up. She was warm and real and smelled like milk and something else, something that was just her, already, at three weeks.
Bridget held her and thought: you are not your profile. You are not a score. You are this specific weight in my arms at this specific hour, and I chose you, or I chose the possibility of you, and I don't know if those are different things, and I don't know if it matters.
She didn't decide anything. She just held her daughter in the dark, and the thought ended the way thoughts end at three in the morning — not with resolution but with exhaustion, which felt close enough.
• • •
Patrick visited on Saturdays. He brought things — a stuffed rabbit, a book about the moon, a set of wooden blocks that were too old for her and exactly right for the kind of uncle he wanted to be. He sat on the floor and made towers that Ada knocked down, and the game was always the same, and he never got bored of it.
One Saturday, Ada was napping and they were drinking tea in the kitchen. Connor was out.
"She's got your stubbornness," Patrick said.
"She's five months old."
"Stubborn since birth. I respect it."
Bridget laughed. Then she said, without planning to: "Do you think about it?"
He didn't ask what she meant. "Sometimes."
"Does it — are you okay?"
He looked at his tea. Turned the cup in his hands. "I think what I think is that you made the best decision you could with the information you had. And I think the information is the problem, not you."
"That's very generous."
"It's not generous. It's what I think." He drank his tea. "I also think you're going to spend the rest of your life wondering about Embryo D, and I think that's the real cost, and nobody at the clinic mentioned it."
She didn't say anything.
"But she's perfect," he said. "You know that. She's absolutely perfect."
From the bedroom, Ada made a sound. Bridget went to get her. When she came back, Patrick was washing his cup, and they didn't talk about it again.
Next chapter: The Waiting Room