The motel by the bus station charged thirty-eight a night and asked no questions. Eve paid for one in cash from the tip envelope and signed her mother's maiden name on the register. Her own name was a line a system tracked her along now.
The room had a chair, a lamp, a bed. The window looked out on a parking lot and a McDonald's sign that buzzed when it shifted from yellow to red. She slept the broken, upright sleep of an overnight flight.
By six she was sitting up against the headboard. The nausea had moved out of morning and into a thing that lived with her, ready when she woke. She stayed where she was, and her hand went under her shirt and laid itself flat against her lower belly, palm down, where the bone of the pubis met the soft beginning of something else, and held there.
Twelve weeks and three days. The book the agency had given her at intake said the uterus rose above the pubic bone around eleven. It said firmness. It did not say what firmness she should expect against a hand that had never expected anything. She held still and counted by the pulse in her own wrist.
She lifted the hand off without finishing the count.
The bank's automated line opened at seven. She called at seven oh three. The robot ran her through the menu twice before it admitted there was a hold, and a third time before it conceded the hold could not be discussed by phone. She would need to come into a branch with valid identification.
Her ID was in her bag. The bag stayed on the bed.
She tapped through the bank's app instead. The balance was visible. The little icon next to it was a padlock. She tapped it. Account holds may take 7 to 14 business days to review.
Two weeks. The pharmacy in Dorchester would not wait two weeks. Mara would not wait. She closed the app.
The legal aid line opened at eight. She called at eight oh five. A woman put her on hold. The hold music was a single piano figure that looped every twenty-two seconds. Eve counted the loops to forty-one before someone picked up.
A man's voice. Mid-fifties by sound. Office noise behind him — phones, a printer, somebody laughing about something not the call.
"Surrogacy," he said, after she had given him the shape of it. "Carrier or intended?"
"Carrier."
"Contract?"
"Yes."
"You have a copy?"
"It was revoked from my cloud yesterday."
A pause that contained information. "Jurisdiction clause on the document?"
"Nevada."
He breathed out. "Ma'am. I'm going to talk for about a minute, and then I'm going to hang up because I have nine more of these today, all right? Nevada means the contract executes under Nevada law no matter where you live. Nevada gives the intended parents broad authority — relocation, medical oversight, agent-of-record. To get out of a contract like that you'd have to prove it void. Fraud, duress, that kind of thing. Duress — you signed for money — that's not duress in Nevada. Fraud — somebody lied to you about something on paper. That you can do. But you need a private attorney who litigates surrogacy in Nevada, and you need money or a contingency, and you need a copy of the contract, which you do not have." A folder closed on his end. "We don't take it. I'm sorry. Try the bar association. They keep a list."
She started to speak.
"Ma'am," he said. "Good luck."
He hung up.
She held the phone to her ear for the time it took the call to register as ended on the screen, and then she set the phone down on the comforter, where it could not be heard.
There was a number for Northbridge that she had been told to use only after hours, only in emergencies. She had not used it. She tried it now, because she wanted to know whether all the doors closed the same way before she stopped pulling on doors.
It rang once.
"You've reached the case file of Eve Halloran. The operator is unavailable. Please leave a message."
She ended the call before the beep.
She set the phone face down on the comforter and stood up.
The Pemberton at noon was the bar she knew. She came in through the side door because the side door went past the storeroom, and the storeroom had a hook where her apron hung on weekdays. Donna's office was dark. A new face was at the host stand. Eve walked past the new face the way she walked past every new face on every shift — with the small forward weight of a person who works here.
Her apron was on the hook. Her name in faded laundry pen across the inside of the strap. She took it off the hook and folded it once and put it in her bag. She took her spare lipstick from the second hook. She took the paperback she had been reading on smoke breaks, and held it against her hip, and decided in the time it took to decide that she would take it. The storeroom smelled the way it always smelled at noon — citrus rind from the morning prep, the cold soap they used on the rubber mats, a thin warm undercurrent from the dish line through the wall. She stood there one breath longer than she needed to and then she went out.
Tomas was at the bar when she came back through.
He was working the lunch crowd — three suits at the rail, a woman with a laptop in the corner, two of the breakfast tables turned over to drinks. He saw her. His hand kept pouring.
When the suits had their drinks he set a glass of water on the bar in the spot where she would have stood, and put a small white napkin under it the way he set water down for any guest. His eyes stayed on the pour.
She came over. She sat on the stool at the end where regulars sat, where she had sat with a coffee on her break two summers ago when the air conditioning had died and Tomas had run a fan from the kitchen.
She drank the water in two swallows. The water tasted of the filter and was cold.
He came down the bar. He stopped on the other side of the rail. He folded a fresh towel and set it under her empty glass and tapped twice on the wood beside it with two fingers — the small private signal he tapped when a guest had been served and a server had been thanked.
"You want anything to eat," he said. It was not a question.
"No. Thank you."
"Phone's on you?"
"Yes."
"Keep it on."
She nodded. He went back down the rail to the suits. The woman with the laptop laughed at something on her screen and the sound carried across the empty middle of the room, and Tomas said something to one of the suits that made the suit lift his glass an inch in a small acknowledgement, and none of it was hers anymore. She left the glass on the napkin and went out through the side door, and the front of house she walked past without turning her head, because the front of house was not hers.
She walked back to the motel because cabs cost money and the bus crossed the river twice for no reason. She walked past the deli where she had bought soup the day before. The soup was still in the takeout bag at the foot of her bed, sealed and cold and going wrong. She would throw it away when she got back to the room. She would not buy soup again for a long time.
Mass Ave was loud at the corner where the bridge traffic met the cross streets, and the wind off the river had the metallic smell of the water in late autumn, and she walked with her hands in her pockets and her chin tucked, the way a person walks when she does not want her face read by strangers.
The phone vibrated in her coat pocket near Mass Ave. One vibration. A text.
She left it unread on the street.
In the room she put the bag down, locked the chain, stood with her back to the door and read it.
Tomorrow, 14:00. The Talbot Inn, room 14, South End. — Northbridge Coordinator.
There was no number above the message. The address was an address she did not know. The room number had been chosen, and that fact sat under the rest of the text like a small flat stone.
Coordinator. The word she had heard yesterday in the doorway of the ultrasound room, on a navy blazer with a smile that did not move. Whether the message came from that woman, or from somebody using the title because the title had already done the work the message needed it to do, was a question the message did not answer.
She tapped the address. A map opened. The motel sat in a stretch of South End she did not know — a block she had never had reason to walk.
She set the alarm for noon. The icon appeared at the top of the screen: a small clock with two hands at twelve. She glanced at it once.
She put the phone face down on the bedside table, and the screen blacked, and the room blacked with it; outside, the McDonald's sign went from yellow to red and back, and the slats of the blind cut bands of color across the ceiling.
Twelve weeks and three days. She put her hand under her shirt and laid it flat against her lower belly in the same place she had laid it that morning. She held it there.
She had thirteen hours and forty minutes until the alarm.