I'll Be Seeing You Read Online Free PDF Page B

crazy.” Victor strode across the reception area and knocked on the closed door.
    Carter opened it. “Oh, Victor, good to see you. We didn’t expect you today.”
    Meghan turned to greet him. Orsini realized she was fighting back tears. He groped for something reassuring to say but could come up with nothing. He had been questioned by the investigators about the call Ed Collins made to him just before the accident. “Yes,” he’d said at the time, “Edwin said he was getting on the bridge.Yes, I’m sure he didn’t say he was getting off it. Do you think I can’t hear? Yes, he wanted to see me the next morning. There wasn’t anything unusual about that. Ed used his car phone all the time.”
    Victor suddenly wondered how long it would be before anyone questioned that it was his word alone that placed Ed Collins on the ramp to the Tappan Zee that night. It was not difficult for him to mirror the concern on Meghan’s face when he shook the hand she extended to him.
10
    A t three o’clock on Sunday afternoon, Meg met Steve Boyle, the PCD cameraman, in the parking lot of the Manning Clinic.
    The clinic was on a hillside two miles from Route 7 in rural Kent, a forty-minute drive north from her home. It had been built in 1890 as the residence of a shrewd businessman whose wife had had the good sense to restrain her ambitious husband from creating an ostentatious display on his meteoric rise to the status of merchant prince. She convinced him that, instead of the pseudopalazzo he had planned, an English manor house was better suited to the beauty of the countryside.
    â€œPrepared for children’s hour?” Meghan asked the cameraman as they trudged up the walk.
    â€œThe Giants are on and we’re stuck with the Munchkins,” Steve groused.
    Inside the mansion, the spacious foyer functioned as a reception area. Oak-paneled walls held framed pictures of the children who owed their existence to the genius ofmodern science. Beyond, the great hall had the ambiance of a comfortable family room, with groupings of furniture that invited intimate conversations or could be angled for informal lectures.
    Booklets with testimonials from grateful parents were scattered on tables. “We wanted a child so badly. Our lives were incomplete. And then we made an appointment at the Manning Clinic . . .” “I’d go to a friend’s baby shower and try not to cry. Someone suggested I look into in vitro fertilization, and Jamie was born fifteen months later . . .” “My fortieth birthday was coming, and I knew it would soon be too late . . .”
    Every year, on the third Sunday in October, the children who had been born as a result of IVF at the Manning Clinic were invited to return with their parents for the annual reunion. Meghan learned that this year three hundred invitations were sent and over two hundred small alumni accepted. It was a large, noisy and festive party.
    In one of the smaller sitting rooms, Meghan interviewed Dr. George Manning, the silver-haired seventy-year-old director of the clinic, and asked him to explain in vitro fertilization.
    â€œIn the simplest possible terms,” he explained, “IVF is a method by which a woman who has great difficulty conceiving is sometimes able to have the baby or babies she wants so desperately. After her menstrual cycle has been monitored, she begins treatment. Fertility drugs are administered so that her ovaries are stimulated to release an abundance of follicles, which are then retrieved.
    â€œThe woman’s partner is asked to provide a semen sample to inseminate the eggs contained in the follicles in the laboratory. The next day an embryologist checks to see which, if any, eggs have been fertilized. If success was achieved, a physician will transfer one or more of the fertilized eggs, which are now referred to as embryos, to the woman’s uterus. If requested, the rest of the embryos will