PART 2 — SOME WOMEN
I met Emory Kessler when I was twenty-five, at a conference, and he was the most interesting man in a room of dull ones.
I was in corporate finance. I was good at it. I was the person my firm sent when a set of books did not make sense, and the reason I was good at it is unromantic: I have an extremely high tolerance for reading the same page nine times.
Aventine Dynamics made industrial sensor housings. His father started it; Emory took it over at thirty-two and nearly killed it by thirty-six.
I want to be precise about 2019 because it matters later.
The company was eleven days from missing payroll. There was a covenant breach on the operating line that Emory had not disclosed to his own board. I spent five months restructuring it, and in April I mortgaged my parents’ house in Cordera — the house my mother died in — and lent the company four hundred and ten thousand dollars, documented, at interest, converting to equity at the next round.
He cried in the kitchen the night the Marchetti term sheet came in and told me he owed me everything.
Four years later he described that money, in a deposition, as “family funds.”
The fertility work started in 2021.
Two years. Three clinics. The last one was Verano Reproductive in Alder Mesa, which is a two-hour drive each way, which I made twenty-nine times.
Every panel, both of us, came back without an identified factor. Unexplained. That is a real category and it is the worst one, because there is nothing to fix and no one to blame, and human beings cannot tolerate no one to blame for very long.
So the Kesslers found someone.
It was never said outright. It was said the way that family says everything, which is in the third person, at a table, while passing something.
Some couples just leave it too late.
She works those hours, and then she wonders.
My mother had four.
Bree was there for a lot of it. She had been folded into that family the way old friends get folded in — she came to Christmas, she came to the lake, Winifred adored her.
She would drive home with me afterward and say they’re monsters, Thee, and I would laugh, and I would feel better.
I want to put down two things about those two years, because “we did fertility treatment” is four words that cover an enormous amount of ground.
The first is the logistics, which nobody warns you about. Monitoring appointments are not scheduled around your life; your life is scheduled around a follicle. I did twenty-nine round trips to Alder Mesa, four hours in the car each time, most of them starting at five in the morning so I could be back for a nine-thirty call. I did injections in an airport bathroom in Denver, in a rental car outside a client’s office, and once in the coat room at a wedding.
Emory came to four of the twenty-nine.
He was, and I want to be exact, never cruel about it in that period. He was absent in the specific way of a man who has decided the thing is your project. He would ask how it went and then not listen to the answer, which at the time I put down to him being frightened.
The second thing is what it does to your standing.
Around month fourteen I stopped telling people. Not because of shame — because of the follow-up. Everyone has a cousin who tried a supplement. Everyone has a story about a couple who relaxed and it happened. There is no version of that conversation where you are not, by the end of it, the problem.
Bree was the one person I kept telling.
She was the only person on earth who had the whole timeline, every cycle, every number, every date. She had it because I gave it to her over sixteen years of friendship and two years of Sunday phone calls.
I have thought about that a great deal since. There was not one single fact about my body or my marriage in that period that she did not have.
Christmas two years ago is the one I go back to.
I had a monitoring appointment in Alder Mesa that morning, on the twenty-third, which I had scheduled for the twenty-third specifically so it wouldn’t collide, and it ran two hours long because the clinic was short-staffed.
I got to the house in Cordera an hour and ten minutes late, in my coat, holding the little insulated bag with the injectables in it, because they have to stay cold and there was nowhere else to put it.
Sixteen people at the table.
Winifred got up from the head of it, came around the corner, took the bag out of my hand — I did not let go at first, and the strap stretched between us — and carried it to the sideboard and set it down there like something that had been tracked in on a shoe.
Then she turned around and said, to the whole table:
“Give me that. There’s nothing wrong with my son. Some women just aren’t built for it. Now sit down and tell the table you’re fine.”
Sixteen adults. Forks in the air.
Emory looked at his wine glass and did not lift his head.
Bree was sitting directly across from him, holding her glass with both hands, and she did not say anything either.
Nobody did.
I said, “I’m fine.”
Then I sat down and ate a Christmas dinner, and drove two hours home the next morning, and did my injection in a gas station bathroom outside Verity Springs because the timing window had moved.
Some women just aren’t built for it.
I heard that sentence in my head for two years. I heard it in the shower. I heard it when a colleague announced a pregnancy in a meeting. There is no version of me that gets to pretend it did not do exactly what she wanted it to do.
