Then I sat down and ate a Christmas dinner, and drove two hours home the next morning, and did my injection in a gas station bathroom outside Verity Springs because the timing window had moved.
Some women just aren’t built for it.
I heard that sentence in my head for two years. I heard it in the shower. I heard it when a colleague announced a pregnancy in a meeting. There is no version of me that gets to pretend it did not do exactly what she wanted it to do.
PART 3 — WHAT I FOUND FIRST
The financial work started in March, six weeks before he filed, and it started for a boring reason: a subscription agreement crossed my desk at home with a signature block that had my husband signing on behalf of an entity I had never heard of.
Cordera Sensor Partners LLC.
Then Aldergate Holdings. Then two more.
I did what I do. It took five weeks, at night, on my own equipment, with an attorney named Roz Ambrogio looped in from week two because I am not stupid.
The short version: he had been moving money out of Aventine into entities he controlled, and the entities had been buying Aventine shares back, and the effect was to dilute a class of stock that included mine.
It was not sophisticated. It was the kind of thing that works only if nobody who reads financial statements for a living is looking at yours.
But that is not what stopped me.
In week four I was reconciling personal card statements against the company’s reimbursement file — routine, boring, the ninth pass — and there were two payments in October of 2022 to an individual, not an entity.
Fourteen hundred dollars and then two thousand two hundred.
The name was Delphine Aury.
I looked her up expecting an escort or a decorator. She was neither.
She was a patient services coordinator at Verano Reproductive Center in Alder Mesa. In 2022 she had been the person who released results.
I sat in my study and did not move for a while.
Then I called the clinic — as a former patient, requesting my complete record, which I am entitled to and which took eleven days and a signed authorization.
The file came in a box.
And in the andrology section there were two reports for the same collection date in October 2022.
The first one is the one Emory and I sat and read together in a small room with a box of tissues on the table, and it said his parameters were within normal range, and the doctor said the words unexplained infertility and I remember thinking, distantly, that at least it wasn’t anyone’s fault.
