I take a deep breath and squeeze Marcus's hands.
"Let's do it," I say, steadier than I feel. "Let's start the fertility treatments. Alabama couldn't stop us from wanting this—Chicago's going to help us get it."
Marcus blinks, like it's finally sinking in. Then he nods.
"Okay," he says, soft. "We're really doing this. Here. Where it's legal."
I reach for the fertility clinic brochure—from Harmony Fertility Clinic, recommended by the Chicago support group I found online. My mind's already spinning. We're about to jump into a world of doctors, needles, hormones, in a city that's still teaching us its rhythms.
Our savings? Already devastated by the move. Insurance? Still figuring out the new plan. And honestly, there's no guarantee this will work. It's a gamble—one we couldn't even make in Alabama, and can't afford not to take in Chicago.
But this is what survival looks like in the post-natural world: calculating risk versus hope, weighing the cost of transformation against the price of staying human in a system that criminalizes your biology.
Still, I picture holding our baby. Building the family we've dreamed about. Creating something beautiful from the ashes of what Alabama tried to destroy. Not just conception, but resurrection. Not just reproduction, but resistance.
"So... what's next?" Marcus asks, his voice tangled in nerves and excitement and the weight of everything we've been through.
You think this is just about fertility treatments? Look deeper. This is where the personal becomes political, where two bodies become a statement about what's possible when love refuses to let law define its limits. This is where we begin the transformation that Alabama tried to criminalize—not just of our bodies, but of our understanding of what it means to create life when life itself has been legislated.