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    “We had a hard time,” Charlotte said. “We were about to try in vitro when I found out I was pregnant.”
    “Grosser,” Amelia said.
    “Amelia!” I passed you over to your mother and pulled your sister up by the hand. “You can wait outside,” I said under my breath.
    The secretary looked at us as we entered the waiting room again, but she didn’t say anything. “What are you going to talk about next?” Amelia challenged. “Your personal experience with hemorrhoids?”
    “That’s enough,” I said, trying hard not to lose my temper in front of the secretary. “We’ll be out soon.”
    While I headed back down the hall, I heard the secretary’s high heels clicking as she walked toward Amelia. “Want a cup of cocoa?” she asked.
    When I entered the conference room again, Charlotte was still talking. “…but I was thirty-eight years old,” she said. “You know what they write on your charts, when you’re thirty-eight? ‘Geriatric pregnancy.’ I was worried about having a Down syndrome child—I never had even heard of OI.”
    “Did you have amnio?”
    “Amnio won’t tell you automatically that a fetus has OI; you’d have to be looking for it because it’s already shown up in your family. But Willow’s case was a spontaneous mutation. It wasn’t inherited.”
    “So you didn’t know before Willow was born that she had OI?” Ramirez asked.
    “We knew when Charlotte’s second ultrasound showed a bunch of broken bones,” I answered. “Look, are we done here? If you don’t want this case, I’m sure I can find—”
    “Do you remember that weird thing at the first ultrasound?” Charlotte said, turning to me.
    “What weird thing?” Ramirez asked.
    “The tech thought the picture of the brain looked too clear.”
    “There’s no such thing as too clear,” I said.
    Ramirez and his associate exchanged a glance. “And what did your OB say?”
    “Nothing.” Charlotte shrugged. “No one even mentioned OI until we did another ultrasound at twenty-seven weeks, and saw all the fractures.”
    Ramirez turned to Marin Gates. “See if it’s ever diagnosed in utero that early,” he ordered, and then he turned back to Charlotte. “Would you be willing to release your medical records to us? We’ll have to do some research on whether or not you have a cause of action—”
    “I thought we didn’t have a lawsuit,” I said.
    “You might, Officer O’Keefe.” Robert Ramirez looked at you as if he was memorizing your features. “Just not the one you thought.”
    Marin
    Twelve years ago I was a senior in college, going nowhere fast, when I sat down at the kitchen table and had a talk with my mother (more on that later). “I don’t know what I want to be,” I said.
    This was hugely ironic for me, because I didn’t really know what I had been, either. Since I was five, I’ve known that I was adopted, which is a politically correct term for being clueless about one’s own origins.
    “What do you like to do?” my mother had asked, taking a sip of her coffee. She took it black; I took mine light and sweet. It was one of thousands of discrepancies between us that always led to unspoken questions: Had my birth mother taken her coffee light and sweet, too? Did she have my blue eyes, my high cheekbones, my left-handedness?
    “I like to read,” I said, and then I rolled my eyes. “This is stupid.”
    “And you like to argue.”
    I smirked at her.
    “Reading. Arguing. Honey,” my mother said, brightening, “you were meant to be a lawyer.”
    Fast-forward nine years: I’d been called back to the doctor’s office because of an abnormal Pap smear. While I was waiting for the gynecologist to come in, the life I didn’t have flashed before my eyes: the kids I’d put off having because I was too busy in law school and building my career; the men I hadn’t dated because I wanted to make law review instead; the house in the country I didn’t buy because I worked such long hours I