PART 2 — SOME WOMEN
I met Emory Kessler when I was twenty-five, at a conference, and he was the most interesting man in a room of dull ones.
I was in corporate finance. I was good at it. I was the person my firm sent when a set of books did not make sense, and the reason I was good at it is unromantic: I have an extremely high tolerance for reading the same page nine times.
Aventine Dynamics made industrial sensor housings. His father started it; Emory took it over at thirty-two and nearly killed it by thirty-six.
I want to be precise about 2019 because it matters later.
The company was eleven days from missing payroll. There was a covenant breach on the operating line that Emory had not disclosed to his own board. I spent five months restructuring it, and in April I mortgaged my parents’ house in Cordera — the house my mother died in — and lent the company four hundred and ten thousand dollars, documented, at interest, converting to equity at the next round.
He cried in the kitchen the night the Marchetti term sheet came in and told me he owed me everything.
Four years later he described that money, in a deposition, as “family funds.”
The fertility work started in 2021.
Two years. Three clinics. The last one was Verano Reproductive in Alder Mesa, which is a two-hour drive each way, which I made twenty-nine times.
Every panel, both of us, came back without an identified factor. Unexplained. That is a real category and it is the worst one, because there is nothing to fix and no one to blame, and human beings cannot tolerate no one to blame for very long.
So the Kesslers found someone.
It was never said outright. It was said the way that family says everything, which is in the third person, at a table, while passing something.
Some couples just leave it too late.
She works those hours, and then she wonders.
My mother had four.
Bree was there for a lot of it. She had been folded into that family the way old friends get folded in — she came to Christmas, she came to the lake, Winifred adored her.
She would drive home with me afterward and say they’re monsters, Thee, and I would laugh, and I would feel better.
