Handle With Care by Jodi Picoult

having sex with him, it would be a pretty empty threat.”
    “There’s your answer, then,” Piper said. “Bring on the candles, oysters, negligee, the whole nine yards…and when he’s blissed out in a hedonistic coma, ask him again.” I heard a voice in the background. “Rob says that’ll work like a charm.”
    “Thank him for the vote of confidence.”
    “Hey, by the way, tell Willow that a person’s thumb is as long as his nose.”
    “Really?” I wedged my hand up to my face to check. “She’ll love that.”
    “Oh, shoot, that’s my call waiting. Why can’t babies get born at nine in the morning?”
    “Is that a rhetorical question?” I said.
    “And we come full circle. Talk to you tomorrow, Char.”
    After I hung up, I stared at the receiver for a long moment. She’ll be better off in the long run, Piper had said.
    Did she believe that, unconditionally? Not just about a rodding surgery but about any action that a good mother would undertake?
    I didn’t know if I could even muster the courage to sue for wrongful birth. Saying abstractly that there were some children who shouldn’t be born was hard enough, but this went one step further. This meant saying one particular child—my child—shouldn’t have been born. What kind of mother would face a judge and a jury, and announce that she wished her child had never existed?
    Either the kind of mother who didn’t love her daughter at all…or the kind of mother who loved her daughter too much. The kind of mother who would say anything and everything if it meant you’d have a better life.
    But even if I came to terms with that moral conundrum, the additional wrinkle here was that the person on the other end of the lawsuit was not a stranger—she was my best friend.
    I thought of the foam pad we had once used to line your car bed and your crib, how sometimes, when I lifted you out of it, I could still see the impression you’d made, like a memory, or a ghost. And then, like magic, it would disappear. The indelible mark I’d left on Piper, the indelible mark she’d left on me—well, maybe they weren’t permanent. For years, I’d believed Piper when she said tests wouldn’t have told us any earlier that you had OI, but she had been talking about blood tests. She’d never even alluded to the fact that other prenatal testing—like ultrasounds—might have picked up your OI. Had she been making excuses for me, or for herself?
    It won’t affect her, a voice in my head murmured. That’s what malpractice insurance is for. But it would affect us. In order to make sure you
could rely on me, I would lose the friend I’d relied on since before you were born.
    Last year, when Emma and Amelia were in sixth grade, the gym teacher had come up behind Emma and squeezed her shoulders while she waited on the sidelines of a softball game. Innocuous, most likely, but Emma had come home saying that it creeped her out. What do I do? Piper had asked me. Give him the benefit of the doubt, or be a helicopter parent? Before I could even offer her my opinion, she’d made up her mind. It’s my daughter, she said. If I don’t go in and open up my mouth, I may live to regret it.
    I loved Piper Reece. But I would always love you more.
    With my heart pounding, I took a business card out of my back pocket and dialed the number before I could lose my nerve.
    “Marin Gates,” said a voice on the other end.
    “Oh,” I stumbled, surprised. I had been anticipating an answering machine this late at night. “I wasn’t expecting you to be there…”
    “Who is this?”
    “Charlotte O’Keefe. I was in your office a couple of weeks ago with my husband about—”
    “Yes, I remember,” Marin said.
    I twisted the metal snake of the phone cord around my arm, imagined the words I would funnel into it, send into the world, make real.
    “Mrs. O’Keefe?”
    “I’m interested in…taking legal action.”
    There was a brief silence. “Why don’t we schedule a time for you