Prologue
May 21, 2001. She’s an adult now. She has one of those real jobs where they pay her and provide her with really good benefits. This is her own healthcare, and her mom lives 1000 miles north of her, so she can’t ask her mom to come with her this time.

She’s a grown up. She needs to take responsibility for her own body. She’s in the first serious relationship she’s ever been in, and she wants to be careful, so she asks some of the younger females in the office about their gynecologists. One of the women gives her a name of a doctor in Clearwater, which is 45 minutes away, but she wants someone she can trust, so she makes an appointment.

It’s very sunny in Florida during the day. It feels like this on the days she drives somewhere for lunch, but usually she spends the day cooped up in the closet they’ve renovated into an office. She wakes up that morning and prints directions from mapquest with her slow inkjet printer, and leaves her small one-bedroom apartment for Clearwater. The roads are winding and complicated and one way, and there are a lot of cars, and a lot of sunlight. She’s nervous, but driving in new places always makes her nervous, so driving in Florida has always put her on edge. She remembers a few months ago when she drove to Clearwater to spend afternoons with the old man who was the father of friends as close as family. She, of course, makes a wrong turn or two trying to find the poorly marked office, but she backtracks and finally makes it.

The receptionist is juggling five things as she approaches the window. She stands there and watches the woman on the phone, scanning the piles of paperwork on the desk. There are shelves with yellow manila folders, each marked with a color label. They give her a pile of forms that they give to the new patients. She glances at the pregnant women in the waiting room, smiles at a nearby baby, and sits in one of the chairs. She starts filling out the forms...