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  'How is it that you came to know the plaintiff in this case?' Charlotte's lawyer asked.

  Janine leaned closer to the microphone on the witness stand. She used to sing karaoke, I remembered, at a local nightclub. She had referred to herself as pathologically single. Now, though, she wore a wedding band.

  People changed. Even the people you thought you knew as well as you knew yourself.

  'She was a patient at the office where I was working,' Janine said. 'Piper Reece's ob-gyn practice.'

  'You're employed by the defendant?'

  'I was for three years, but now I work at Northwestern Memorial Hospital.'

  The lawyer was staring off at a wall, as if she wasn't even listening. 'Ms. Gates,' the judge prompted.

  'Sorry,' she said, snapping to attention. 'You're employed by the defendant?'

  'You just asked me that.'

  'Right. Um, can you tell us the circumstances under which you met Charlotte O'Keefe?'

  'She came in for an eighteen-week ultrasound.'

  'Who else was there?'

  'Her husband,' Janine said.

  'Was the defendant there?'

  For the first time, Janine met my eye. 'Not at first. The way we did it, I'd perform the ultrasound and discuss it with her; and she'd read the results and talk to the patient.'

  'What happened during Charlotte O'Keefe's ultrasound, Ms. Weissbach?'

  'Piper had told me to be on the lookout for anything that might signify Down syndrome. The patient's quad screen had shown a slightly elevated risk. I was excited to be working with a new machine - it had only just arrived, and was state of the art. I got Mrs O'Keefe settled on the table, put some gel onto her abdomen, and then moved the transducer around to get several clear views of the fetus.'

  'What did you see?' the lawyer asked.

  'The femurs were measuring on the small side, which can sometimes be a flag for Down syndrome, but none of the other indicators were present.'

  'Anything else?'

  'Yes,' Janine said. 'Some of the images were incredibly clear. Particularly the one of the fetal brain.'

  'Did you mention these findings to the defendant?'

  'Yes. She said that the femur wasn't off the charts, that it could simply be because the mother was short,' Janine answered.

  'What about the clarity of the images? Did the defendant have anything to say about that?'

  'No,' Janine said. 'She didn't.'

  The night I'd driven Charlotte home from her twenty-seven-week ultrasound, the one with all the broken bones visible, I'd stopped being her friend and started being a doctor. I sat at the kitchen table and used medical terminology, which almost acted like a sedative itself: the pain in Charlotte's and Sean's eyes dulled as I heaped them with information they could not understand. I talked to them about the physician I'd already called for a consultation.

  At one point, Amelia had flitted into the kitchen. Charlotte hastily wiped her eyes. 'Hey, sweetie,' she said.

  'I came to say good night to the baby,' Amelia said, and she ran up to Charlotte where she sat and wrapped her arms as best as she could around her mother's belly.

  Charlotte made a tiny sound, a mewling. 'Not so tight,' she managed, and I knew what she was thinking: had this eager love broken some of your bones?

  'But I want her to come out,' Amelia said. 'I'm sick of waiting.'

  Charlotte stood up. 'I think I might go lie down, too.' She held out her hand for Amelia, and they walked out of the kitchen.

  Sean sank into the seat she'd vacated. 'It's me, right?' He looked up at me, haunted. 'I'm the reason the baby's like this.'

  'No--'

  'Charlotte had one kid who was perfectly fine,' he said. 'Do the math.'

  'This is probably a spontaneous mutation. There's nothing you could have done to prevent it.' I couldn't have prevented it, either. But that didn't keep me from feeling guilty, just like Sean. 'You have to take care of her, because she can't fall apart right now. Don't let her look this up on the Internet before you see the doctor tomorrow; don't tell her you're worried.'

  'I can't lie,' Sean said.

  'Well, you will, if you love her.'

  Now, all these years later, I wondered why I could not forgive Charlotte for following this very same advice.

  I didn't like Guy Booker, but then again, when you choose malpractice insurance providers, you're not going for the folks you want to have over for Christmas dinner. He was good at making someone squirm on the witness stand, like an insect being pinned by a collector who wanted to scrutinize it more closely. 'Ms. Weissbach,' Booker said, standing up to do his cross-examination, 'have you ever seen another fetus that had a similar finding in the measurement of the femur?'

  'Of course.'

  'Do you happen to know the outcome?'

  Charlotte's lawyer stood up. 'Objection, Your Honor. The witness is just a technologist, not a physician.'

  'She sees this every day,' Booker countered. 'She's specially trained to read sonograms.'

  'Sustained.'

  'Well,' Janine said, miffed. 'For your information, it's not so easy to read the results of an ultrasound. I may just be a technologist, but I'm also supposed to point out things that might be problematic.' She jerked her chin toward me. 'Piper Reece was my boss. I was just doing my job.'

  She did not say anything more, but I could hear it all the same: Unlike you.

  Charlotte

  S

  omething was wrong with my lawyer. She was fidgeting; she kept missing questions and forgetting answers. It got me wondering: Was doubt contagious? Had Marin sat next to me all day while I fought the urge to stand up and put an end to all this, and then awakened this morning with the same gut instincts?

  She had called in a witness I did not know - Dr Thurber, who was British but had become the head of radiology at Lucile Packard Children's Hospital at Stanford before moving to Shriners in Omaha and applying his knowledge as a radiologist to OI kids. According to the endless list of credentials Marin had led him through, Dr Thurber had read thousands of ultrasounds during his career, had lectured throughout the world, and donated two weeks of his vacation every year to provide care to expectant mothers in impoverished countries.

  Basically, he was a saint. A really smart one.

  'Dr Thurber,' Marin said, 'for those of us who aren't familiar with ultrasounds, can you explain the technology?'

  'It's a diagnostic tool, in terms of obstetrics,' the radiologist said. 'The equipment is a real-time scanner. Sound waves get emitted from a transducer, which is placed against the mother's abdomen and moved around to reflect the contents of the uterus. The image gets projected onto a monitor - a sonogram.'

  'What are ultrasounds used for?'

  'To diagnose and confirm pregnancy, to assess fetal heartbeat and fetal malformations, to measure the fetus in order to assess the gestational age and growth, to see the location of the placenta, to determine the amount of amniotic fluid - among other things.'

  'When are ultrasounds traditionally performed during pregnancy?' Marin asked.

  'There's no hard-and-fast rule, but sometimes scans can be done at about seven weeks to confirm pregnancy and rule out ectopic or molar pregnancies. Most women have at least one ultrasound performed between eighteen and twenty weeks.'

  'What happens during that ultrasound?'

  'By then, the fetus is large enough to check out the anatomy and to look for congenital malformations,' Dr Thurber said. 'Certain bones will be measured, to make sure the baby is the right size based on the date of conception. They'll make sure organs are in the right place, and that the spine's intact. Basically, it's a confirmation that everything's where it's supposed to be. And of course, you get to go home with a picture that stays taped to your fridge for the next six months.'

  There were a few laughs on the jury. Had I had a picture of you, from your ultrasound? I couldn't remember. When I think back to that day, I only feel this great tidal wash of relief, from the moment Piper