Your Privileges End Tonight

Natalie's POV

At seven o'clock, while Victoria's guests were handing their coats to the valet at Riverside Country Club, I was sitting in a blue plastic chair at the Lakeshore Fertility Center.

The waiting room hadn't changed in four years. Same antiseptic smell. Same humming vending machine. Same poster on the wall across from me, a smiling couple holding a newborn wrapped in a white blanket, with the words *Your Family Starts Here* printed underneath.

The first time I sat in this chair, Alex had been in the one beside me. He'd laced his fingers through mine, nodded at that poster, and said, "That's going to be us, Nat. Someday. Just watch."

The chair beside me was empty now. I'd put my purse in it so no one would sit there.

A blue appointment slip lay in my lap, along with the cycle seven medication list I'd printed last week. Every box was unchecked. Every drug was still sealed in the bin at home.

"Natalie Carter?"

Dr. Melissa Ortega stood in the doorway with my chart under her arm. She'd done all six of my transfers. She'd also been the one to call me after each of them.

I followed her into the consult room and sat down across from her desk. Then I slid the medication list toward her before she could open the file.

"I need to cancel my seventh IVF cycle," I said. "My husband has taken the money."

She looked at me for a second, then gently put the paper down.

"I'm so sorry, Natalie."

"Don't be. I just need the paperwork."

She nodded and turned to her computer. "Give me a few minutes to pull the cancellation forms."

She stepped out. My phone buzzed in my purse.

It was a text from Jenna Kowalski, whose husband worked with Alex in the ER. We'd gone to their wedding together. I'd held her bouquet while she fixed her shoe.

*Nat, are you okay?? Are you seeing this?*

Under it was a link. *Live: Victoria's Celebration 🥂*

I should have put the phone away, but I tapped the link.

The video was shaky and loud, filmed from somewhere near the back of the ballroom. Crystal chandeliers. A champagne tower glowing gold under the lights, five tiers high. People were laughing and clinking glasses.

Then the camera found the stage, and there was my husband.

He was wearing the navy suit I'd picked out for him at Nordstrom last spring. I'd made the tailor take in the jacket twice. A silver pin glinted on his lapel, right over his heart.

He held out his hand, and Victoria took it. She walked up the steps beside him, no crutches, just leaning against his arm, her dress the color of champagne.

Alex tapped the microphone. The room quieted.

"Thank you all for coming," he said. "A few months ago, I almost lost someone who means more to me than I knew how to admit. Victoria, thank you for walking back into my life."

Applause. Someone whistled.

He looked down at her, and his face did something I hadn't seen in years. It went soft all the way through.

"Victoria and I are ready to stop hiding what we mean to each other."

The ballroom erupted. Victoria pressed her cheek against his shoulder, and Alex bent his head and kissed her forehead, right there under the lights, in front of everyone who had ever eaten dinner at our table.

I didn't feel surprised. I felt like a lock had finally clicked open.

The nights he didn't come home. The phone face down. The car turning the wrong way out of this very parking lot. The way he'd stopped touching me, stopped asking, stopped remembering. None of it had been random. It had all been leading to this stage.

The door opened. I turned the phone over on my knee.

Dr. Ortega set two pages in front of me and pointed to the signature lines. I signed both without reading them. My handwriting looked like someone else's.

"That takes care of the cycle," she said. She didn't take the forms back right away. "But there's something else we need to talk about, and I'd rather you hear it from me."

She opened my file and pulled out a printed sheet. The header said *Consent Withdrawal Notice*.

"We received this from Alex on Tuesday. Your husband has withdrawn his consent. We cannot proceed with a transfer."

I stared at the page. His name was typed at the bottom, with a scanned signature I'd know anywhere. The date matched the envelope he'd ripped out of my hands in our kitchen.

*Annual paperwork. Routine.*

"Withdrawn," I said. "From what, exactly?"

"From using your shared embryos for any future transfer."

My fingers were pressed so hard against the edge of her desk that the tips had gone white. I made myself look up.

"Are they still here? Both of them?"

"Yes."

"You're sure? You checked?"

She turned the monitor toward me. A storage record filled the screen, with two lines highlighted in yellow. *Embryo ID LFC-2207-A. Embryo ID LFC-2207-B. Status: Cryopreserved.*

"They're safe," she said. "Nothing has been destroyed. But until the consent issue between the two of you is resolved, we can't schedule a transfer. Not with your consent alone."

I read the two ID numbers twice. It was strange how something so small could look like a name.

"Can he have them destroyed?" My voice came out thinner than I wanted. "Can he just send another email and make them disappear?"

"No." She said it quickly and firmly, like she'd been waiting for me to ask. "Stopping a transfer and deciding what ultimately happens to the embryos are two separate things. Disposition is governed by the storage agreement you both signed, along with state law. One email from one partner doesn't override that."

She took a stapled document from the file and handed it to me. It was our storage agreement, the one we'd signed side by side in the room next door, Alex joking about the mortgage.

"That's your copy. Read section nine. And I'd strongly suggest you talk to an attorney."

I folded it carefully and slid it into my purse next to the blue appointment slip.

"I need you to preserve everything," I said. "Every record, every email he sent, every form. Don't let anything get changed or deleted. My lawyer will be contacting you."

I didn't have a lawyer yet. By Monday, I would.

Dr. Ortega made a note on the file. "Done. I'll flag the account myself."

She walked me down the hall. At the front doors, I stopped to pull up my hood, and my phone lit up in my hand. The video was still playing.

Alex was raising a champagne flute now, the silver pin catching the light.

"To second chances," he said. "And to finally being happy."

The whole room lifted their glasses with him.

Outside, rain was blowing sideways across the parking lot, cold enough to sting. Dr. Ortega held the door half open and looked at me with real worry.

"Natalie, is there someone who can come get you? You shouldn't drive upset."

I watched my husband drink to his happiness on a screen the size of my palm.

"He gets to celebrate his new beginning tonight," I said. "I need to protect what remains of mine."

I closed the video. Then I opened my settings and scrolled to my contacts until I found *Alex ♥*.

His ringtone was the song from our first dance. I'd set it eight years ago so I'd always know when he was calling, even from across a crowded room, even half-asleep. I used to smile before I even picked up.

I tapped it, selected *Default*, and saved.

The rain soaked through my hood as I walked to my car. Halfway across the lot, my phone started to ring.

A flat, ordinary chime, the same as any stranger's.

I didn't have to look to know who it was.