Lily returned two hours later with a vintage portable tape recorder she had bought for forty dollars from an estate sale down the road. It was clunky, silver plastic, with heavy black buttons that went clack when depressed.

We put fresh AA batteries inside. Sophie selected the tape labeled Thoughts on Being Alone (May 2007).

The room was silent except for the hum of the refrigerator. Outside, a light April rain tapped against the glass, identical to the rain that had fallen on the night the wall gave up its secret.

Sophie pressed PLAY.

The tape hissed. White noise filled the room—the static of magnetic tape dragged across an old playback head. Then came a sharp intake of breath. A clearing of a throat. A car horn honking faintly in the background.

"Testing. Okay. This is Caroline. May fourteenth."

Sophie gasped. Her hand flew to her mouth.

The voice was lighter than I had imagined. It wasn't the voice of a martyr or a tragic figure from a legal brief. It was the voice of a young woman in her early thirties, sitting in an apartment with a ticking clock, speaking with a slight Midwestern lilt.

"I had the meeting with Dr. Vale this afternoon," the recording continued, the sound slightly muffled as if the recorder was resting on a kitchen table. "He looked at the follicle count. It’s low. Lower than last November. He said if we do another autologous cycle with donor sperm, the odds of a viable blastocyst are under twelve percent. Twelve percent. That’s not an odds ratio. That’s a lottery ticket."

A pause. The sound of a ceramic mug setting down on wood.

"He asked me about directed donation. He said sometimes couples who finish their families have excess embryos that they release for compassionate adoption. 'Compassionate disposition' is what the form calls it. It sounds so clean. Like someone leaving a coat on a park bench for a cold morning. I told him I didn't want to feel like a thief. He laughed. He said, 'Caroline, these are embryos that would otherwise be discarded or held in liquid nitrogen indefinitely. If a couple signs a release, they are giving a gift'."

Sophie was weeping silently, her tears dripping onto her denim jeans.

"I looked at the donor catalog this evening," Caroline’s voice murmured from the speaker. "No names, of course. Just numbers. Account codes. Heights, eye colors, medical histories. It feels clinical and strange, but then I think... what if there is a child waiting inside one of those straws? What if a child is just waiting for a body to grow in? If someone out there chose to donate, I would spend my whole life making sure that child knew they were wanted twice. Once by the people who created them, and once by me."

The tape hissed for a long moment. Then Caroline let out a small, self-deprecating chuckle.

"I bought a yellow sweater today at the outlet. Newborn size. That’s ridiculous. Denise told me I’m jinxing myself. Denise thinks everything is an inventory line. She told me today that an embryo is just tissue until the pregnancy test turns pink. Maybe she’s right. But I washed the sweater anyway. It’s in the bottom drawer."

The machine went clack. The tape stopped.

None of us spoke.

Lily leaned her head against Sophie’s shoulder. Sophie sat frozen, staring at the little plastic rectangle inside the tape deck.

"She washed a sweater," Sophie whispered.

"She wanted you twice," Lily said softly. "That’s what she said."

"She didn't know," I said, feeling a lump in my throat that made it hard to swallow. "She genuinely believed we had signed that form. Dr. Vale and Denise Hall built a wall of lies between our family and hers before you were ever transferred."

"No," Sophie said, wiping her face with the back of her sleeve. "They didn't build a wall. They built a shortcut for themselves, and they made us live inside the wreckage."

She reached out and ejected the cassette. She held it in both hands, feeling the light, hollow weight of forty minutes of magnetic tape.

"I’m keeping these," Sophie said.

"They're yours," I told her.

"Not for Caroline Park to listen to yet," Sophie added, looking at me. "She’s eighteen. She’s still in the phase where she thinks bioethics is an argument you win in a seminar. I’ll give them to her when she has her own baby, or when she realizes that adults are mostly just terrified children trying to survive their own bad luck."

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