Bette: Who cares?

Tina: What about Dan Foxworthy?

Bette: Oh, fuck Dan Foxworthy. It’s our life. We don’t need his permission to do what we think is right for us.

Tina: And you’re okay with …?

Bette: I wanna have a baby with you. And if we make it together, that’s enough for me to know it’s our baby.

Tina: Okay.

Bette: Yeah?

Tina: Yeah. You sure?

Bette: Yeah.

“How did that turn out?” Paul asked.

“Another major disaster but this time it brought us closer and we reconnected. After giving it more thought I decided to use the sperm that we had in the cryobank. We had a successful insemination.”

“You say you reconnected at the time of the insemination … what made you drift apart again to where you were so distant by the time you miscarried just barely three months later?”

“She got really busy with work and we started to drift apart again. I was spending more time with friends while she was consumed with fighting these internal and external battles at the CAC. She wasn’t even around when I did the pregnancy test. I did it with a friend of ours Alice, and then Bette’s sister Kit came by and we told her. Kit’s first question was ‘does Bette know?’ Until she asked it didn’t even occur to me. I called Bette at work later that day and I asked her to come home early. I wanted to prepare a special dinner for us so I could tell her the news. All she could say was that ‘she’d try.’”

“Did she make it home early?”

“Yeah but she walked in ranting and raving about something or other. Then she saw the extra place setting. She thought I’d invited someone else to dinner and she started ranting about that too until she realized that I’d left the pregnancy test stick on the plate. That’s how I told her we were pregnant.”

“Was she happy?”

“I’d never seen her happier. She was just in awe. She just kept kissing me and telling me that she loved me. She was so proud. That look was back in her eyes but then she got upset again when she found that all but one of our friends knew about the baby before she did. Our friend Alice had blabbed it to everyone. Bette thought that I would rather be sharing everything with Alice instead of her, but she just wasn’t available. I was doing a lot on my own. Sometimes I just needed someone with me and Alice was there all the time.”