Chapter 24: Ask for the Lab Pages

The whale mural was finished in March, and thirty children stood back from the wall to look at it.

It filled the whole back wall of the Foundation art room, blue and gray, with a green eye the size of a plate.

Valeria stood under it in a paint-stained smock with a double stroller at her elbow.

The girl was asleep in it.

The boy was awake and chewing a paintbrush handle she had told him not to chew.

"He's got an opinion about that blue," said a small boy in a yellow shirt.

"He has an opinion about everything," Valeria said. "Ask his father."

The Foundation had a new president now, an elected one, who had asked Valeria in January whether she wanted the title.

She had said no.

She had said she wanted the classes, a bigger budget and her name on the door of the art room, and she had gotten all three.

At four o'clock, a woman stopped in the doorway.

She was in her thirties, in a good coat, with a thick folder held tight against her chest.

She did not look at the mural.

She looked at the stroller.

"I'm sorry," she said. "They told me at the front desk you were here. I'm not a parent. I don't have a child in the class."

"Come in," Valeria said. "It's fine."

The woman stayed on the threshold.

"I saw the video," she said. "The one from the ballroom. My sister sent it to me. I've watched it forty times."

"I'm sorry."

"Don't be. I wanted to ask you something, and I didn't know who else to ask."

She opened the folder with unsteady hands.

Inside was a single sheet of paper on a clinic's letterhead.

*Patient is sterile.*

"Six years," the woman said. "My husband's family has been polite about it for six years. I stopped going to the Sunday dinners."

Keep reading free with an account. Start Sterile? I Had Children with the Magnate from Chapter 1, then sign up free to read the rest of this chapter.