The clinic door exhales a cooler air than the street and the smell of disinfectant rides under something sweeter—citrus-flavored gloves, maybe. I give the alias I practiced in the car and slide cash across the glass. The receptionist counts without looking at me, the crisp edges snapping like tiny flags. I hold my hands together to keep them from trembling against the counter.
“No insurance?” she says, bored and kind at the same time.
“Self-pay,” I say. “Paper records only.” I keep my voice steady, clinical, a woman I could trust if I were her.
She nods and slides a clipboard through the slot. “Initial where you see the privacy release,” she says. “Refuse the portal if you want; there’s a checkbox.”
I read slowly because speed is how I miss traps. I check no portal, no marketing, no external records request. Under emergency contact, I print a number that routes to a voicemail I control, the one that pings an alias email. When I pass the clipboard back, she stamps the corner with a purple RECEIVED that bleeds faintly into the paper.
A door clicks and a quiet woman in scrubs says my alias like a secret she will keep. I follow her down the hallway where a poster of a lake hangs crooked—waterline too high, brochure-level blue. The hum of machines thickens the farther we go; the sound wraps my ribs like a bandage pulled one notch too tight.
In the room, the ultrasound unit waits like a patient beast. The technician smiles with just the eyes and pulls a tablet from a pocket. She taps through fields, fingers quick and careful.
“Partner with you today?” she asks, looking at the screen instead of my face.
“No partner present,” I say. I hear the dryness in my mouth.
She taps a box labeled exactly that. “Okay,” she says. “Do you want audio?”
“No sound.” The answer comes out fast, then I slow it down. “Please. For privacy.”
“Of course,” she says, and she flips a small toggle on the machine. The speaker’s icon goes to a polite slash. I watch her tap, tap, tap—the choreography of consent and denial. My breath ticks in the space between each little sound, steady and wrong.
I lie back on the crinkling paper and lift my shirt to my sternum. The gel hits cold and sweetly chemical; it smells like a fruit I can’t name that grew up in a lab. The wand finds skin, then angle, then purpose. The monitor blooms.
“Deep breath,” she says softly. “There.”
The room narrows to grayscale and geometry. A small black lake inside me holds a brighter speck, a punctuation mark at the end of a sentence I’ve been too afraid to write. There is no heartbeat in the room—only hum—and yet my own heart scouts ahead, mapping escape routes and entries.
“Measurements only,” I say, the words stacking like sandbags.
“Crown-rump length estimates… five and a half weeks,” she murmurs, stylus tapping. “Very early. Do you want printouts?”
“Three,” I say. “No name on the face.” I feel my hands flatten against the paper under me, palms slick with gel I haven’t touched.
She nods and takes another angle, then another, watching labels bloom in the corner of the screen: CRL, GS, EDD. I memorize them the way I memorize car plates and footer timestamps. The machine hums at a domestic pitch, the pitch of household appliances doing chores; if it were a voice it would be saying soon and steady.
“How’s the lake today?” she asks, trying for gentle. The small talk lands funny; there’s a framed photo in the hall of the shoreline in spring, full, bright.
“Low,” I say. “Dam schedule.” I swallow. “Glass houses creak.”
“They always do when it’s dry,” she says, and in the reflection on the monitor I catch her brows crease like a parenthesis. She freezes a frame and prints: the machine coughs out glossy rectangles with an indifferent rattle.
She hands me a tissue for the gel and steps to the counter. “I’ll mark no partner on the chart, and I can keep sound off by default if you return.”
“Thank you,” I say. “Can you put the file under an alias account? No portal, cash only, no automatic sharing.”
“We have a self-pay alias flag,” she says. “It keeps records local unless a court compels them.” She looks up at me now. “I can’t promise what I can’t promise, but I can mark the intention.”
“Please do,” I say. “I’d like the DICOMs on a disc or a thumb drive. I brought one.”
I hold up the tiny encrypted drive from my pocket—the matte case warms quickly in my palm. She hesitates, then nods.
“I’ll copy to your device,” she says. “We don’t love USBs, but the policy doesn’t forbid it.” She holds out a gloved hand and I lay the drive in it like a prayer coin. The gel towels off easy and cold; I ball the tissue and tuck it into the exam table’s little waste flap, hearing the faint soft thud as it lands.
She finishes the measurements. I dress, sit, and watch her complete the template: NAME (ALIAS), DOB (TRUE), PARTNER: NO, AUDIO: OFF, PORTAL: DECLINED. She prints a cover sheet on buff paper that reads SELF-PAY in a red stamp across the corner, then slides two glossy stills into a kraft envelope.
“Do you want the envelope sealed?” she asks.
“Seal and tape it,” I say. “I’m photographing the seal, the stamp, and the tape.”
Her eyes flash with something like respect. “I’ll get the tape.”
She presses the flap down, lays a strip of clear over it, and slides the envelope across to me along with an itemized receipt that lists ultrasound, self-pay, no coding like it’s an act of mercy. I pull my phone, take three photos—front, corner, stamped edge—and add a fourth of the receipt with the time. The lens fogs for a second from the gel on my fingertips; I wipe it on my sleeve and shoot again.
“Anything else?” she asks.
“Two things,” I say. “One: Please add a note that any ‘welfare’ check requests should be routed to counsel. Two: If anyone calls asking for ‘mission purity’ or uses the phrase ‘child-neutral,’ please note it and refuse.”
She tilts her head, then writes something on a sticky note and tucks it to the inside of the paper chart before it goes wherever paper charts go. “We get odd calls,” she says softly. “We also get subpoenas. I can’t promise what I can’t promise.”
“I know,” I say. “Thank you for telling me the limits in plain language.”
“Do you have support?” she asks, the way they have to. The question lands on my collarbones like a weight matched to me.
“I have an attorney,” I say. “And a mother who taught me to keep receipts.”
She smiles with the top half of her face again. “Good start,” she says, and taps the tablet to close the chart. “We’re done.”
In the lobby, I pay the balance in cash and count the change like I’m proving I can still do math. The receptionist slips the receipt into the envelope, then thinks better of it and hands it to me separately—a quiet kindness: stamps on one, itemization on another. As I push through the door, July heat slaps the last of the gel chill off my skin. The air smells like tar and lawn and the ozone that the storm failed to rinse last night.
I walk two blocks to a pharmacy I don’t usually use and buy ginger candies, tea, and a bottle of water I don’t need. At the register, I add lip balm and a magazine with a lake on the cover to bury the tell. The clerk rings it up without looking at my name and asks if I want a bag.
“No bag,” I say. “I’ll carry it.” People don’t question ginger candies. People assume you’re carsick, hungover, trying a trend.
Outside, I pull the candies open and suck one until the burn replaces the taste of gel. I hold the envelope under my arm and walk toward the path where the lake keeps its new low line, the rocks like teeth. The dam makes the water pulse in long minutes; I match my breath to it to make a metronome I can trust.
I sit on a bench where the wood is warm and sticky, angle the envelope for another photo with the water behind it—date, time, stamp in frame. A trio of donors in weekend linen pass by, laughing, their sunglasses polished to readiness. One of the men wears cufflinks shaped like rooks even with his rolled sleeves; I capture a reflection in my phone screen by accident and keep it. Donor salons are never far, even outside; I can hear live-captioned toasts in our neighborhood in my bones.
A small drone moseys past the far shoreline and I don’t flinch. I tuck the envelope deeper under my arm and open my bag for my drive. I plug it into the little phone adapter on the bench, copy the DICOM folder to the encrypted vault, and generate a hash. I write the string on the inside of the lip balm’s paper wrap with the pharmacy pen they forgot to chain down. I photograph that too and then suck another candy, choosing the one shaped like a tiny coin.
A mother pushes a stroller past the chalked alcove line near the kiosk, and I see two HOA vests glance out from the coffee window like meerkats. I keep my eyes on the water where a dragonfly stitches the air to the surface with neat ticks. I am awed by the fact that a speck inside me could be louder than all this if I let it.
The walk home is a corridor of glass. Every modern house holds up its bone structure to be admired: beams, joints, angles pretending they have nothing to hide. I pass one door with a rook knob that catches the sun and throws a small chess shadow on the concrete. I step on it and keep going.
I let myself in through the side door to dodge the front camera. The Glass House breathes cedar at me, warm and familiar, and the ozone hangs like the echo of last night’s weather. I set the envelope on the kitchen island and take one clean photo on the marble: SELF-PAY, tape seam, timestamp over the stone’s veining like a topographic map.
I open the safe panel in the pantry, the one I pretended I never learned to open, and slide the envelope into a document sleeve labeled MED—Alias. I drop the thumb drive into a second sleeve marked MED—Hash and add a printed copy of the hash string itself because paper is still king when someone wants you to prove you existed. I lock the safe, wipe the panel with the soft side of a sponge to blur any fingertip oil, and breathe through my nose until cedar gives way to ordinary kitchen air.
At the desk, I open my air-gapped laptop and import the scans a second time to a nested vault. I generate a fresh hash, compare, and write MATCH beside both strings in a notebook I will burn when this is over. I print two copies of the cover sheet with the red stamp because I like a twin, then staple one to an affidavit template I downloaded from nowhere that can be traced to me. I write: I paid cash on [date], alias on file, audio declined, printouts provided, and sign my real name, then slide the pen back into the drawer where I keep my mother’s ring.
The ginger heat lingers at the back of my throat like a held word. I put the candies in a glass bowl by the sink because ginger belongs in kitchens; it will look like I tried a new brand and forgot it. I tuck the tea into the cabinet next to the peppermint where no one will notice an alphabet out of order.
I lean my forehead against the cool of the fridge and whisper the truth I can finally say without a test strip in my palm. “I’m pregnant,” I say to stainless steel and the humming compressor, to cedar and ozone and hidden racks. The word doesn’t bounce back; it settles. I feel both infinite and hunted and choose to write that down before the feeling edits itself.
On the counter, my phone vibrates. A calendar notification floats up: Clinic—Alias Account Confirmed: No Portal. Relief hits like fresh wind off the lake. It lifts—and then the house chimes a polite, neutral sound that the system uses for everything from packages to presence.
I freeze, the ginger candy going flat on my tongue. The chime repeats, then a knock, so soft it could be manners or menace.
I pocket the candies, cover the envelope with a grocery flyer, and step toward the door that faces the lake. Through the glass, the water shows its low line and a pair of silhouettes stand at the edge of the path—polite posture, clipped lanyards.
My hand rests on the rook knob, cold and certain. I ask the question I have to get right on the first try: Do I open the door with my new proof tucked behind cedar, or do I let them knock again so the recorder captures their patience turning into policy?