“Peter chose him,” I said. “He told me Dr. Whitaker had a strong record with high-risk pregnancies.”
“Did you ever meet with him alone?”
“No.”
“Did he explain the embryo transfer himself?”
“Peter was always there.”
Naomi instructed the clinic to preserve all material related to my treatment and barred Peter from obtaining my hospital information or making decisions about my care. Those precautions frightened me, yet the limits also offered relief. I had spent so long allowing Peter to speak during appointments that claiming the authority to decide who could see me or my records felt unfamiliar. Naomi treated that authority as something unquestionably mine.
Records arrived the next day. Most seemed routine: prescriptions, appointment summaries, bills, and scans. But the embryology pages were different. Three embryo identification numbers were obscured as “confidential third-party information.” My transfer was described as a gestational-carrier procedure, and an electronic consent was connected to an email address I’d never owned.
