The clinic waiting room hums quietly—soft lighting, sterile furniture, nerves stitched into every corner like my grandmother's careful embroidery on Sunday tablecloths.
Kevin and I sit close, fingers intertwined, like we're holding each other together against the undertow of hope and fear
Dr. Ramirez steps into the room with a smile that gives her away before she even speaks.
The kind of smile that carries good news like a gift you've been waiting your whole life to receive.
"Fifteen eggs," she says.
"All mature. Donor 1092 did great."
Relief hits like the first breath after being underwater too long.
Then joy, bright and sudden as lightning.
Then that familiar fear I've stopped pretending I don't carry, the one that whispers what if this is too good to be true, the voice that sounds suspiciously like my father.
Kevin squeezes my hand.
I glance at him—that same swirl of emotion in his eyes, hope and terror dancing together like partners who've known each other forever.
"What's next?" he asks, and his voice carries the weight of someone trying to sound calm while standing at the edge of everything he's ever wanted.
"We'll fertilize them with Kevin's sample," Dr. Ramirez says.
"Then watch the embryos develop over the next few days. After about five days, we'll assess which embryos have developed best for transfer."
Her voice is steady, professional, but I can hear the underlying excitement.
She's done this a thousand times, but she still believes in miracles.
I nod, trying to hold onto the science without letting it slip through my nerves like water through a sieve.
Five days.
Blastocyst stage.
I'd read that somewhere late at night when I couldn't sleep, when the future felt too big and too fragile to touch.
"Once we've identified the strongest embryos based on morphology, we'll prepare your gestational carrier for the transfer. It's a simple procedure—no sedation, no surgery. But I know it feels anything but simple when it's your whole future balanced on the edge of a petri dish."
Kevin reaches for my hand under the table.
I let him, grateful for the anchor.
Then came the risks—because of course there are always risks.
Life never promises anything without asking for something in return.
"Sometimes even a perfect embryo won't implant. Biology doesn't always cooperate with our hopes."
She pauses, letting that sink in like stones into still water.
"And if we transfer more than one, we increase the risk of multiples—which can be harder on the carrier and the babies."
I already know we'd lean toward transferring one.
We weren't here to play odds like gambling addicts—we were here to build something real, and careful, and worthy of all the love we've stored up for this moment.
She asks if we'd made a decision about PGT—to screen embryos for chromosomal abnormalities—things like Down syndrome, Turner syndrome, other conditions that have names but not faces until they belong to someone you love.
It can also detect the sperm source in cases like ours.
And yes, it can tell us the sex.
That's all available now, spread out like a buffet of knowledge we're not sure we're hungry for.
But what she didn't say outright—and what I can't stop thinking about—is what's coming next.
Traits.
Predispositions.
Eye color, height, maybe even intelligence someday.
There are whispers of it already in some labs overseas, scientists playing God with genetic code like my grandmother used to play dominoes on Sunday afternoons—carefully, methodically, with the confidence that comes from years of practice.
It's not science fiction anymore—it's a fork in the road that leads to places we might not want to go.
Still, as she said the words, something in me fluttered like a caged bird.
After all we've gone through to get to this point—the law that chased us out of Florida, the move across country, the starting over—are we taking on unnecessary risks by passing up pre-genetic screening?
Are we being brave or just foolish?
PGT gives us power.
But I'm learning that love—real, messy, imperfect love—asks us to let go of some of that.
To trust in what we can't control, because control is an illusion anyway, especially for people like us who've learned that the ground can shift beneath your feet anytime the law decides you don't belong.
And maybe that's the kind of parent I want to be.
The kind who chooses love over certainty, hope over guarantees.
The kind who trusts that the child we're meant to have is the one we'll get, perfect in ways we haven't learned to see yet.
We both shake our heads like children refusing medicine that might be good for us.
"No," Kevin says gently, the way he talks to patients' parents when they're scared.
"We decided not to. It just didn't feel right for us."
Dr. Ramirez nods, without judgment, the way good doctors do when they understand that medicine is as much about the heart as it is about science.
"Understood. That means we'll rely on morphology to select the strongest blastocyst for transfer. We can also discuss non-invasive prenatal screening later in the pregnancy, if you choose."
And then the part that stuck with me most—embryo disposition.
"If you end up with more embryos than you use," she says, and her voice gets softer like she's talking about something sacred, "you'll eventually need to decide what to do with them—freeze, donate, discard, research. It's a deeply personal choice. You don't have to decide today, but someday you'll need to choose what happens to the possibilities you don't use."
I glance at Kevin, and he gives me a small nod.
We'd talked about that.
Sort of.
Enough to know we weren't ready to make a forever decision about tomorrow's maybes, about the siblings our child might never have.
As we drove home, Kevin squeezed my hand again.
"You okay?" he asked, and his voice carried all the tenderness he usually saves for his youngest patients.
I thought about the paperwork, the medical jargon, the what-ifs that multiply like cells dividing.
The frozen embryos we might never meet, the futures we'll never choose.
And then I thought about the embryo we might choose, the future we might hold.
"Yeah," I said, watching palm trees zip past like promises we're driving toward.
"I'm good. Scared, but good."
Because this was us choosing to move forward, even when nothing was guaranteed except the possibility of heartbreak.
This was science and trust and a little bit of faith—not the religious kind that my father wields like a weapon, but the kind that says: let's try, because maybe this is how our family begins.
In a place where beginning is legal.
Where our choices are ours to make without apology.
Where love doesn't need permission from anyone except the people doing the loving.
In Florida, we never would have made it this far.
Never would have been allowed to even dream this specifically, this boldly.
Here, we're fifteen embryos closer to the family we came to build.
Fifteen possibilities growing in a lab while we learn to trust that some things are worth the risk.
Another step forward.
One more piece of the future, gently unfolding like origami in careful hands.