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The annual inventory at Meridian Reproductive Institute reconciles to the straw, and then Dr. Malachi Balogun opens a tank nobody put on the list.

Tank Four was purged, tagged and signed out of service in February 2017, and his own signature is on the countersign line. There is liquid nitrogen in it. There are two embryos in it, on a barcode format the laboratory stopped printing in 2011. Somebody has been buying nitrogen for a dead tank every third Wednesday for nine years and seven months.

Balogun wrote the chain of custody protocol this state adopted. His name is on every page of it, and he has six weeks before an inspector opens that room. What a night embryologist finds in the delivery tickets leads to a storage company in a business park in Kent, to a canister paid for quarterly by a woman who was told nothing survived the warming, and to nine other families who were told the same thing on nine other days.

He can prove what was taken. To prove it he will have to say out loud, on the record, in front of the state, what he did on one Friday afternoon in March 2017 when the telephone rang and somebody quoted his own document back to him and asked him for a favour.