Natalia

The small rectangle of reinforced glass in the white metal door that leads into the walk-in fridge room—housing anything the labs can't store—shows enough of the space to confirm it's empty.

"No one's there." I push the bar and step in, silent Samson trailing behind me.

We go past the shelves on the left and the counter on the right to the corner of the room that's impossible to see if you're just walking by.

The time we take to reach the wall is enough for me to regret not bringing in the fleece zip up I usually keep for this purpose. I fold my arms over my chest and hide my hands in my armpits.

Samson is not the villain.

But neither am I.

"What d'you need to tell me?" I ask calmly. The walk here put a damper on my irritation.

He rocks on the heels of his shoes. "I shouldn't have mentioned kids at the event."

"One thing we agree on."

"But"—there is always a but. I resist rolling my eyes at him. Let's see what his but is about before I bring on the litany—"But it didn't come out of nowhere. I've been thinking about it a lot with the whole wedding prep. I talked to Mom, and she agrees. This is not the best time to have kids if both of us are working as hard as we are. She had me at thirty, but she quit her job for ten years until Madeline and I were both in school before she returned to work part-time. And she was exhausted those ten years without having to go to work on top of that."

Wow. The sub-zero temperatures are turning my skin under the lab coat into a thin layer of ice, but my ears are working perfectly. I heard every word he said, yet my mind refuses to believe that bullshit came out of his mouth. The dumpster-fire my love for Samson has turned into feeds my anger. "So you propose we don't have kids because your mom thinks it's going to be too hard?"

He drags all ten fingers through his curls. "I don't propose anything."

"Doesn't sound like it to me."

"Natalia, please, let's not fight anymore. I'm not trying to make this worse than it already is." The serious, even-keel guy I've lived with, whom not much can affect, is not who's in front of me. He rubs the stubble on his always-shaven face. "I'm trying to make up with you and patch up this bizarre situation we find ourselves in."

Empathy should be one of the things filling my gut, but my anger is taking so much space, it leaves no corner for pity or tenderness. I poke Samson into his chest, my fingers shaking with me. "The situation you created."

"Sure." He lowers his eyes to mine. "Blame everything on me." He raises his arms and encompasses the room, as if it's me and not him who's exaggerating.

"Who should I blame it on?" I push away from him. The cold seeps through my pores. My bones are trembling. "We had a plan: get married, have at least one kid before I'm thirty-six, get my lab to a point where I can get a larger headcount,"—the chattering of my teeth makes it hard for me to talk—"move to Boston, where I can be part of the nano-delivery history."

"That was your plan," he shouts over the hum of the air-conditioner.

"Well, you didn't even have a plan when we met," I shout back. "I gave you my plan. You agreed to my plan."

Samson waves his index finger in front of my face. "I never agreed to your plan. I loved how passionate you are about it." He presses both palms into his stomach. "But I have goals too."

My eyebrows climb to my hairline. "That's why we are in Chicago." I circle my head around to emphasize where we are because of him. For him. "Who goes to Chicago to make breakthroughs in nano-delivery?" My ears are full of the pounding of my heart. "But you got a job here." I stab the metal shelf that houses a set of beakers. They clank, and I steady them before they break.

"You didn't just follow me." He gives me a fierce headshake. "We talked about it, we agreed, we had a discussion. Plus, they promised you can have your own lab here sooner than in any other company in Boston. Moving to Chicago was a mutual decision."

I plant my hands on my hips. "And having kids wasn't?"

"Tell me when we talked about it." He tilts his head as if he's confident he's right.

"When we met." My hands fly into the air. "On the second date, after you ticked all the check marks and had no red flags, I showed you my plan. You were impressed. You said you liked it."

"That was ten years ago on our second date." His voice goes from annoyed to disbelieving. "I was trying to impress you. You can be intimidating sometimes. I wasn't going to launch into a discussion on the merits of having children." His Adam's apple moves as he swallows. "I didn't even think about having children then," he says in a defeated tone.

"You clearly did now."

"I did. That's why we need to come up with a solution that works for both of us. A compromise." Samson manages to sound both wounded and placating.

Now he is interested in working together. Now that it's too late. "I'm out of time to do that. I'm thirty-five. I have a ticking bomb in my abdomen that is very hard to ignore." The white of the room is blinding. The Arctic temperatures are congealing the blood in my veins. I rub my arms up and down but can barely feel the material of the lab coat. "You can have kids when you are sixty-five and retired. I can't."

"You can freeze the eggs. The insurance even covers that." Samson presses his nails into the corners eyes.

"Don't talk to me about freezing my eggs." I don't have energy left for another round of this discussion. The discussion that leads us nowhere because we are not on the same page. I'm no longer sure we ever were. I turn on my lecturer stance and tell him what he could've learned if he attempted to look into the options in earnest. "The success rate of the unfreezing, successful insemination, and bringing a baby to term from frozen eggs in geriatric pregnancies, which mine would already be, is low. I spent all weekend looking at options, and trying to come up with solutions, but the longer I wait, the higher the risk is that it will not happen for me."

As if he has depleted his reservoir of argument, Samson leans against the wall. "There is IVF."

"Stop." I hover my quivering hand over his mouth. "Stop telling me what I can do with my body."

"I'm not telling you anything. We are partners. We can get a counselor, talk these things over. Give me some time."

"You don't get the urgency. You just don't."

"Because you arbitrarily assigned thirty-six as the age to have children and now we have to hurry up and do it to not mess up your perfect plan?" He's back to shouting.

"No." I close my eyes. "Because if you had doubts." I tell more to myself than to him. "You should have told me about them." I sound as tired as I feel. I raise my eyelids that are heavy like a ton of ice. "I wouldn't have wasted ten years. I would've found someone who was on the same page as me about all the items on my list. All the things that are important to me."

"So I wasted ten years of your life?" His lips form a thin line. "Everything we went through in grad school, the moves, the life we built together?"

Dumbstruck that he doesn't get what I mean, I slam the back of my hand against my palm. The sting restarts the circulation in my numbed-by-the-cold skin. "If you knew from the beginning that you didn't want kids, you lied to me for ten years."

"You make me sound like I wanted to deceive you. I am not a bad guy. I didn't have an evil plan to dupe you. I just didn't know what I wanted. I thought we'll figure it out when we get there. If you really really want kids that much, maybe you need to quit your job and stay home with the baby."

I press my icy fingers into my temples. "You want me to quit my job?"

"Mom did it. You don't have to stay home for ten years like her. Maybe for three, until the baby is old enough to go to a good daycare. We can maybe hire a nanny then."

I spin on my icicled feet and storm to the door.

"What did I say? Why are you being this emotional?"

His words stop me in my tracks.

Emotional. I am not emotional. I'm analytical. I stomp my way back to Samson. "Let me give you my very rational explanations why I do not think we will ever agree on this topic." My voice is as frigid as the room we're in. "I am not your mom. I am not my mom. I want to be a Mom. I want to keep working, because I spent last twenty years of my life trying to claw my way up a very rigged STEM ladder to get to a place I'm at right now and not working for even three years will set me back at least ten."

"I understand. Maybe you work part time."

"I. Work. Part-time," I say through my teeth. Heat prickles the back of my eyes. "Me? What about you?"

"You know I can't. I'm up for a promotion in the next year, and then I have the sabbatical lined-up, and the next three years there is not time for me to take more than two-three weeks off and even that will be a stretch."

"I do understand. My schedule is equally full. Finding six weeks for maternity leave will be freaking hard, but I will figure it out."

"We don't both need to be out for six weeks. I'll take a week off when the baby is born, and then maybe two more weeks later."

"No." An alarm buzzes in my gut. "This is all wrong. This is not how any of it is supposed to go."

"Then let's just wait." Samson cradles my face in his palms. His searching eyes beg me to agree. "Let's wait five years."

"I'll be forty."

"So what? People have kids at forty."

I place my hands on his and escape from the man I no longer wish to call mine. "I don't want to be one of those people."

"There must be a way for us to get what we both want."

"Let me know when you find it, but I'm going to look for solutions of my own. Ones that might not involve you."

"Natalia—"

I give him my back, let the door close behind me, and don't wait for Samson to finish his sentence.

11.16.22

Author's Note

I'm off to LA tomorrow for Wattcon, and with Thanksgiving break here in the US next week, I'm not sure what my schedule will be like. I will attempt to edit one more chapter and bring us back to Phillip's side of the events.

With both kids sick, packing for the event, and editing the chapter, I'm at 0 words for my NaNoWriMo count for today. I'll have to stay up for a couple more hours to do some damage to my remaining wordcount.

Yesterday, I passed the 35K threshold. Less than 15K words left to the finishing line of 50K words.

P.S. I wrote the first intimate scene between Nata and Phillip yesterday too, and I don't see a way out of not changing the book to 'mature' status. I tried to keep it PG-13 but for this couple, I don't think there's going to be a realistic way to do that.

P.P.S. For updates form Wattcon, follow me on IG or TikTok (I'm around on Facebook and Twitter but don't use them much).

P.P.P.S Huge thank you to @rubyranawrites for making sure Nata's lab sounds legit.

P.P.P.P.S. As always, I appreciate all the likes/votes, comments, and adding the book to your public or private reading list. Seeing you interact with the story and letting me know you want to know more, is a huge motivator for me. Thank you!

Love,

GR