…”both babies are biologically yours, Mr. Hayes. Not Andrew’s. Both of them.”
Andrew sat back down slowly. My wife, Megan, put her face in her hands. I didn’t understand why they both looked more shaken by good news than they would have been by bad news.
Then Megan told me the truth. During our last round of IVF, the clinic warned her that my sample was very weak and the chances were low. She was terrified. We’d been trying for six years, and she knew I blamed myself. A nurse quietly mentioned that because Andrew and I were identical twins, his sample would be “genetically the same.” Megan asked Andrew. He agreed, out of love for both of us, on the condition that I would never know.
“We never touched each other,” Megan sobbed. “It was a vial and a form. I just wanted us to have a family. And then the boys were born, and your mother kept saying one looked like Andrew, and I was so ashamed I couldn’t look at him.”
The specialist explained what had actually happened. The clinic’s records showed that Andrew’s vial had been mislabeled and never used. Both embryos had been created with my sample after all. The “difference” my mother saw was just two babies being two different people.
I didn’t know whether to laugh or scream. My wife and my brother had made a huge decision about my body and my children behind my back. And it hadn’t even happened.
I was angry for months. Megan and I went to counseling. Andrew and I didn’t speak until the boys’ first birthday, when he showed up at the door with two tiny baseball gloves and said, “I was wrong. I should have told you to tell him.”
What saved us, in the end, was honesty. Megan told me every detail. I told her how small I’d felt during those years of failed treatments. We had never really talked about it.
Our boys are four now. One loves trucks, one loves books. Both have my ears, unfortunately. Andrew is their favorite uncle, and every Thanksgiving he makes the same toast: “To the vial that never was.”
