Ava, page 1
Praise for Ava
“Through crisp, authoritative prose, Dillon’s expertise and empathy shine, making this seemingly impossible genetic innovation feel eerily plausible in the novel’s not-so-farfetched political and legislative landscape.”—BookLife Reviews, editor’s pick
“Ava is a stunning debut that confronts the inevitable intersection of science, motherhood, and bodily autonomy with unflinching honesty.”—Tanya Chernov, author of A Real Emotional Girl
“As an avid reader I always look for books that make a difference, that entertain and also educate. The lessons in Ava are relevant and important, and Victoria Dillon weaves these lessons throughout her book in a brilliant way. It is obvious Dillon has done her homework and the extensive research that makes this book possible. This is definitely a 5-star read.”—Laura L. Engel, author of You’ll Forget This Ever Happened
Copyright © 2026 Victoria Dillon
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, except for brief quotations in reviews, educational works, or other uses permitted by copyright law.
Published in 2026 by
She Writes Press, an imprint of The Stable Book Group
32 Court Street, Suite 2109
Brooklyn, NY 11201
https://shewritespress.com
Library of Congress Control Number: 2025919165
ISBN: 979-8-89636-086-5
eISBN: 979-8-89636-087-2
Interior Designer: Andrea Reider
Interior illustrations: Arun Kumar
Printed in the United States
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.
No part of this publication may be used to train generative artificial intelligence (AI) models. The publisher and author reserve all rights related to the use of this content in machine learning.
All company and product names mentioned in this book may be trademarks or registered trademarks of their respective owners. They are used for identification purposes only and do not imply endorsement or affiliation.
To Graham McCormick.
You were the best of all the good eggs in this world.
PROLOGUE
Tap-tap-tap.
“Easy now . . . easy.”
“Yes, yes. I know. I’m being easy.”
Tap-tap.
“Can you see his hair? What color is it?”
Sigh.
Tap-tap-tap-tap-tap-tap.
“Still nothing?”
“Please, just let us focus, okay?”
Tap-tap-tap-tap.
CRACK.
Gasp.
“That’s it! Peel off the rest of it!”
“So, is his hair brown?”
“Please, Mom . . . give us a sec, okay?”
Pieces of glistening shell drop to the floor, revealing remnants of amnion coating a head of thick, brown hair. Gently, after the rest of the shell is removed to expose his ruddy, smooth skin, the young couple dries off their new baby boy.
PART I
CHAPTER 1
September 3, 2031
AP News
Nashville mother of two dies “senselessly” from untreated ectopic pregnancy, pro-choice advocates assert
I can’t breathe . . . I can’t breathe . . .
Larkin coughed and wheezed as she fell to her hands and knees in the warm grass near the Rock, a well-known landmark at the edge of the University of Tennessee campus. Her eyes burned and watered as she tried to focus on the blurry figures rushing past her as they screamed in panic and yelled obscenities. She started to crawl in their direction, past the large hunk of dolomite that was now splattered with red paint, covering the orange-and-white checkerboard pattern that had been there that morning.
Someone grabbed her wrist and yanked her upright. She stumbled behind them, using her other hand to wipe her eyes with her shirt, her backpack rhythmically striking her back each time her feet hit the ground. The stranger yelled to her as they ran, but the surrounding chaos muffled their voice. Something covered the stranger’s mouth and nose, and Larkin wished she had thought to bring a bandana. She tried to reply and at least say thank you, but she could only let out a raspy hack.
They hurried between two buildings and, after a brief sprint, abruptly stopped. Larkin could tell she was in a shaded area as the air felt cooler. The stranger guided her to a folding chair and helped her take off her backpack, reassuring her she would be okay before saying a quick goodbye.
Next, she heard a woman’s voice, gravelly from age and too many cigarettes.
“I’m Maxine, Ms. Puffy Eyes. I’m a nurse, and I’m here to help you,” she said with fatigued sympathy. “Hold your head back. Let’s get this crap washed out of your eyes.”
The cold saline was a welcome relief to Larkin’s throbbing eyes. She held her head back as the liquid poured down her face and onto her T-shirt. Maxine stopped now and then for Larkin to sputter and cough.
“Did you lose your friends in this mess?” Maxine asked as Larkin caught her breath.
“No, I came alone after my shift at the bookstore. I wasn’t here very long when all of this happened.”
“Well, I’ve been helping at these protests for a long time,” she said as she flushed Larkin’s eyes once more. Holding Larkin’s chin and moving her head from left to right, Maxine added, “Always the same old, same old. Something really pisses folks off, like that poor young lady in Nashville. They gather and make clever signs that might be seen on the news. They get petitions signed and write to their congressmen. And in a few days, things die down, and nothing changes until the next outrage, and it starts all over again, whether it’s about gun control, abortion, or whatever, you know? Same thing. We haven’t had a real win since ’73, and it’s been nothing but losses since then.”
“So, do you think we are wasting our time? That I’m wasting my time?”
“Your heart’s in the right place and your cause is good, but this isn’t working, is it?” Maxine said as she stopped flushing Larkin’s eyes. She put her hand on her hip, waiting impatiently for a reply.
“No. It’s really not,” Larkin quietly agreed. “So, do you have any suggestions?”
“I’m seventy-nine, and I’m tired. I’m all out of suggestions,” she said dryly. “But you all keep showing up, so I’ll keep showing up to help you.”
“I appreciate it.”
“You don’t have to thank me. Just promise me you’ll think of some other way to fix this shit show, okay?”
Larkin nodded and dabbed her eyes with the back of her hand. She felt better, but the saline had washed out her contacts. Larkin squinted to focus, but Maxine was only a blurry visage.
“You should be good now. You can rest here a bit. I need to get on to the next well-intentioned idiot.” She sighed and lumbered away.
“Alright, Mr. Raven Hair,” Larkin heard Maxine say with the same lack of enthusiasm. “Looks like you’re going to need some staples to that gash on your head.”
Unable to drive without her contacts, Larkin had to walk the mile to her apartment. Once there, she put on her glasses and lay down on her couch. She sent a quick text to her parents, letting them know she was safe—they had sent increasingly urgent messages asking where she was. She scrolled through her social media accounts and saw the photos her friends had posted of protests at other universities and city centers. Most had ended the same way this one had: tear gas and disarray. Some of her friends had been hit with batons or rubber bullets. A few of them had been arrested and needed bail money. She sent them what she could through her cash app.
She closed her eyes and hoped that it would be different this time. That this time, change would come. But she knew Maxine was right.
CHAPTER 2
The soft tapping of computer keys provided a disciplined white noise. Larkin was studying alone in the library during her senior year of college, as she had most Sundays for the past three years. Her eyes were still a little swollen from the day before, but her cough was better. She checked her phone to see if her best friend, Aubrey, had replied to an earlier message, but it was still unread. Larkin supposed she was consumed with the premed classes she was taking at Vanderbilt, a few hours away, and went back to taking notes.
Another student joined her at the smooth-grained cherry table. He hung his backpack on his chair and sat catty-corner from Larkin, where he opened his laptop and placed a large calculator beside it. Muttering to himself, he looked at his phone with concern.
“Excuse me,” he whispered. “Do you have a charger I can borrow? My battery is dying, and my phone’s at 2 percent.”
“I think so,” Larkin replied as she dug through the front pocket of her well-worn backpack, which lay on the table. She rummaged past a pack of gum, hand sanitizer, and mint lip balm. When she felt a cord at the bottom, she handed it to him.
“Thank you so much.” He sighed with relief. “Part of my class notes are on my phone. I would have been screwed without them.”
Larkin smiled politely and went back to her reading, glancing up at her new tablemate now and then. Thick, wavy, jet-black hair spilled over his forehead in large curls. He had to brush them away often, revealing his sky-blue eyes. When he smiled, she noticed a small chip in his upper front tooth. She thought about asking him how he’d gotten the chip, but he was probably asked that all the time. Strangers often asked her how tall she was and if she played basketball. The answer was always “five feet, ten inches” and “no.” She always felt self-conscious about her height being wasted when those strangers looked disappointed by her reply.
When he reached for a pencil he had dropped, his hair fell forward again, and she noticed the glint of stainless steel staples on the side of his head, embedded in dried, crusted blood.
“I’m Larkin, by the way.”
“Larkin,” he repeated, as if burning the name into his memory. “Nice to meet you. I’m Spencer.”
“I think I know you as Mr. Raven Hair. I’m also known as Ms. Puffy Eyes to Nurse Maxine.” She smiled.
“So that was you getting drenched in water?” Spencer chuckled. “I think we kept her pretty busy tending to all of us misguided morons. She gave me a pretty good lecture on wasting my time after I got whacked with a can of tear gas.”
“I got the same lecture, and she does have a point.”
Spencer nodded as he distractedly rubbed his wound. “Do you mind if I ask what you’re studying?”
“I’m working on comparative biology right now. It’s one of my favorite courses,” she replied with just a trace of a Southern lilt.
“I have no idea what that is,” he earnestly replied.
She laughed and reassured him that not many people did, including her parents, who were simply proud she had found a passion for science early in her life. She said, “Part of it is studying the similarities of specific traits of different species as they grow from embryos. It also involves looking at the mechanisms that lead to the natural variations between species.”
Spencer pretended to look sleepy, with heavier and heavier eyelids, and then plunked his head onto his laptop.
Larkin lightly pushed the top of his head. “It’s really interesting!” she insisted.
He popped up with a straight back and wide eyes and promised to listen.
“So . . .” she began and then hesitated. She didn’t want to embarrass herself by sharing a soliloquy of science that might end with an uncomfortable silence followed by one of them trying to make polite excuses and a swift departure. Spencer remained attentive, patiently waiting for Larkin to begin as these seeds of doubt attempted to sow themselves in her brain. She sighed, and with a small smile, she began again.
“So . . . have you ever thought about how your hands develop?” she asked, keeping her voice low so as not to disturb the others in the library.
He shook his head as she gestured for his hand. He slid into the other chair, so he was now directly facing her. She held his hand in hers and curled it into a fist. “Do you think your hands start like this, and then fingers start to pop up from the base of your hand and grow out from there, like this?” Larkin pulled each of his fingers from his closed hand.
“I honestly have never thought about that,” he replied.
She noticed him looking at the silver rings on her fingers, the multicolored rope bracelet on her right wrist, and the plastic bracelet that said “Thanks, Science!” Then she opened his hand and told him to spread out his fingers. “Your hand actually starts like a paddle at first, and your fingers develop within that paddle. As the embryo grows, at some point, our hands go through a process called apoptosis where the cells in between the developing fingers are preprogrammed to die.” She took her right index finger and slid it between each of his fingers as her left hand held his wrist.
“If that didn’t happen, we’d have hands that looked more like a frog’s. The same process happens with toes. But,” she paused. She let go of his hand and animatedly held both of hers next to her face, palms toward him, as if she were beckoning for him to stop and listen. “Sometimes the process fails, and children can be born with webbed fingers and toes, or they might be completely fused together. I’ve always wondered if that would make them faster swimmers.” She tapped her chin with her finger, pondering the thought. She continued excitedly. “Did you know some people can have three or more nipples?”
“Well, now this class is getting more interesting.” Spencer grinned.
“People. Men and women.”
“Oh . . .” he said with feigned disappointment as his shoulders dropped. He gave her a wry smile.
“When we are developing as embryos, there’s an area called the milk line that grows from our armpits to our groin, and it has several areas where nipples form,” Larkin continued as she traced her finger down the side of her body. “In most humans, those areas regress very early in development, leaving only two, but in some people, one or two extra may not completely go away. If it doesn’t, it can look like a mole below one of the normal nipples. And guys have nipples because this area forms during development even before your sex is determined. And,” Larkin said, whispering as loudly as possible, “some women with a third nipple can even lactate from that nipple! It can produce milk if there are some remnants of breast tissue there. There are lots of celebrities who have supernumerary nipples. Harry Styles has two extra ones!”
Spencer looked incredulous.
“A lot of people don’t even know they’ve been walking around all their life with a third nipple. Lift up your shirt.”
“What?”
“Let me see if you have extra nipples.”
“Would that be good or bad?”
“Neither.” She grinned. “Just curious.”
Spencer glanced around the library. The other students were focused on their laptops and books. He lifted his T-shirt while Larkin leaned forward and inspected his torso.
“Nope. Just two.” She sighed and gave him a playful frown.
He pulled down his shirt and looked at her with wonder. “You really love studying this, don’t you?”
“Yes, I do. It’s amazing to me how species look so similar when we first start developing, but our DNA signals determine which species will have feathers, which will have fur, which will have scales. But we start out looking so much alike. How does that happen? Why did it happen? Did you know we even start out with tails when we are embryos? They go away at about eight weeks of development, and all we are left with is a tailbone.”
“How boring. I’d love to have a long tail!”
“I know, right?”
As Larkin had learned about the similarities between embryos of different species, she simply couldn’t deny the argument in favor of evolution—it seemed so logical to her. She told Spencer that she and her best friend had resoundingly lost a classroom debate in high school when they’d defended evolution over creationism. Her biology teacher had praised her after class for giving a strong argument but hoped she would understand creationism better after her class went on a field trip to the Creation Museum in Kentucky the following week.
Spencer told her the Scopes Monkey Trial had been held over a hundred years ago in the town where he grew up, and residents there still pronounced evolution as “evil-lution.”
Larkin’s experience in high school had left her undeterred and only fueled her interests. She told Spencer she’d always pictured herself working in a lab surrounded by microscopes and books, and she already had a bench research job lined up with the university’s Department of Genetics and Development after graduation. She was going to work in a lab with Dr. James Davis studying mandibular osteogenesis and facial morphogenesis.
Spencer jokingly accused her of making up random words.
She clarified that she would be working with a researcher to investigate the development of facial malformations, specifically cleft palate and cleft lip.
“He’s studying the development of beaks in chickens because there are so many similarities between chicken and human development, so it is a good model to use,” she explained. “Chickens can get cleft palates, and they can also get something called parrot beak where their lower jaw grows too large, like an underbite.” She continued, “My mom and I were both born with underbites called mandibular prognathism. She had to have her jaw broken and wired shut for six weeks when she was a teenager. I just had to have braces, thank goodness. So, I have a personal interest in this research as well. And the PhD doc I’m going to work with is amazingly cool. He’s incredibly intelligent and supportive. He has to be a genius. He is very intimidating to talk to because he’s so smart.”
