He looked toward the curtained sliding glass doors. “I don’t want to have this conversation in here.” He nodded toward the bed as if it could overhear them. He switched off the lamp, then began opening the curtains. Beyond the glass, she could see the white ripple of waves as they rushed toward the shore. Sam snapped his jeans, then slid open one of the doors. “Let’s go for a walk,” he said.
She slipped off her sandals and dangled them from her fingertips as she followed him out to the patio. They climbed over the iron railing and crossed the grass to the beach where the air was dark and balmy, filled with salt and the rush and fall of the waves. A crescent moon bisected the ocean with a sliver of light. He took her hand. Yes. She’d needed that. Needed to know he wasn’t angry that she’d come.
“No babies tonight?” he asked.
“None. Last night, I delivered my doula’s first.” It had been a peaceful birth in the small candlelit bedroom Suzanne shared with her husband, Zeke, who had been by her side every minute. The infant with the big name, Cleveland Ezekiel Johnson, had slipped into Noelle’s hands with such ease for a first baby. “It went very well.” Now Emerson was talking about a home delivery. Being the midwife of a relative was frowned upon, but the thought of delivering her own niece or nephew made Noelle smile. No one—except Sam—would be any the wiser.
“You’ll be there for Tara and me when we’re ready,” Sam said, like a test. “Right?”
She focused on the way his hand felt in hers. “Sam,” she said, “you can change your mind. People do it. People realize they’re making mistakes that will impact so many people for the rest of their lives. You can—”
“Shh.” He squeezed her hand hard. “Please, just…don’t mess with my head, all right? I’ve thought about it inside out and backward these past couple of years, Noelle. You know that. You know I’ve wrestled with this and I’ve made a choice. Please respect it.”
“You love me,” she said.
He didn’t deny it. “There’s more to consider than love,” he said.
“I don’t think so.”
“I love Tara, too, and we’re better matched than you and I are. You know that. I want a house in the burbs. I want—”
“The white picket fence. The dog. The kids. I know you say that, but—”
“You’re one of the best people I know.” He interrupted her. “On the scale of incredible women, you’re up there with Tara. In some ways, you even top her. But she wants the same life I want, Noelle. Admit it to me. You don’t want to entertain a roomful of lawyers, do you? You don’t want to do the Wilmington social scene, the things I’ll need to do—my wife will need to do—for my career.”
She didn’t answer. It was all true. She didn’t want any of that, but she believed with all her heart that, deep down, Sam didn’t want it, either.
He stopped walking, turning to face her. She saw the moon—two little silver crescents—reflected in his eyes. “You’re a fantasy,” he said, “and Tara’s my reality. With you…I always feel as though if I touch you, my hand will pass right through you. Like you’re an apparition.”
She lifted his hand, slid it beneath her shirt to her bare breast. “Does this feel like an apparition?” she asked. She let go of his hand but he didn’t lower it. She felt his thumb graze her nipple and knew he was making a decision. She knew in her heart, though, it wasn’t a decision that would erase the wedding coming up in two weeks. He was making a decision for tonight. For right now.
He leaned forward, pressing his lips against hers. She felt his erection through his jeans, through her skirt. Right now was not what she’d come here for. She wanted forever. Yet as her nipple tightened beneath the touch of his fingers and her heartbeat thrummed between her legs, she forgot about forever. She would take whatever he would give her tonight. It would have to last all their lives, through his world of picket fences and expensive haircuts and clean, pressed suits and her world of patchwork furniture and middle-of-the-night runs filled with blood and birth. If tonight was all she could have of him, she would make it worth remembering.
They lay on their backs in the sand afterward, staring at the bowl of stars above them. They’d rolled her skirt up to form a pillow beneath her head and Sam rested his own head on his jeans. She could feel spray from the waves on her bare skin as she rolled toward him, running her hand across his chest. “Are you all right?” she asked.
He didn’t answer, but he sank his fingers gently into her hair. “I should feel worse than I do,” he said finally.
“You feel guilty for not feeling guilty?” She smiled.
“I don’t think it’s sunk in yet. You know, I’ve never cheated on Tara. In the seven years we’ve been together. Never.”
“Don’t use that word. Cheat. Please.”
“This…you understand this doesn’t change anything?” His chin brushed her temple as he spoke.
“It changes something for me,” she said. “It gives me a memory to hold on to.”
He curled a strand of her hair around his finger. “You could have any of a hundred men who want you,” he said. “Ian, for example.”
She ignored the comment. She knew Sam’s new law partner had a thing for her, but the attraction was one-sided. Ian was nice enough, good-looking in a clean-cut sort of way and smart as a whip. She’d considered sleeping with him, but thought that might be a mistake. He was the type who’d want more, and the truth was, if she was going to be with a man for anything long term, he would need to be a Sam clone, and Ian wasn’t.
“I don’t want you to worry about this,” she said. “About tonight. I’m not going to ask anything of you like this, ever again. If you feel sure you’re doing the right thing by marrying Tara, I’ll support that one hundred percent because I love you both.” She heard the crack in her voice, completely unexpected. Sam rubbed her shoulder. “I’ll go out with Ian a few times and give him a chance, okay?”
“Good,” he said. “You’ll make him a happy man.”
She sat up with a sigh and reached for her clothes. “I should go,” she said, pulling her blouse over her head. She stood and dusted the sand from her thighs as Sam began to dress. It was good she had done this, she thought. Yes, she’d betrayed one of her closest friends and she knew that would haunt her, but she’d needed to do it to let Sam go. Otherwise, she’d be mooning over him for years. Decades. And that could only have been more harmful to her friendship with Tara in the long run. Now she was finished, she told herself as she slipped into her skirt. This chapter of longing was closed.
She pointed toward the parking lot behind the Blockade Runner. “My car’s on this end of the lot,” she said.
He put his arm around her as they walked across the sand. His silence worried her, but once they reached her car he hugged her, holding her for a long time, and she pressed her hands flat against his bare back. “No regrets, Sam,” she said. “Please.”
He pulled away from her slowly, running his palm down the length of her arm before opening her car door for her. “Be well,” he said.
“You, too.” She sat down behind the wheel and, without looking back at him, drove away.
Her tears surprised her with how quickly they came. Her body convulsed with them as she drove and she could barely see the road in front of her. The night was inky black as she crossed the bridge to the mainland, and when she stopped at a red light she could see no other cars on the road at all. She pressed her hands to her face, wishing she could escape from her body.
Suddenly, the squeal of brakes filled her head and she opened her eyes to see headlights swerving toward her. Letting out a scream, she turned her wheel sharply to the left and stepped on the gas. The oncoming car caught her right bumper, spinning her car around and tossing her, unbelted, against the dashboard. She pressed hard on the brake and felt as though every muscle in her back snapped in two as her car jerked to a stop.
A man jumped out of the other car and began running toward her, shouting, waving his arms wildly in the air.
She locked her car doors. Was he crazy? Furious? It took her a moment to understand what he was saying.
“You don’t have your lights on, asshole!” he shouted. “Where the fuck are your lights?”
No lights? God! What was wrong with her? Her hands shook as she flicked the knob for her headlights. She saw the man pull a phone from his pocket. The police. Jumbled thoughts raced through her mind, one of them rising quickly to the top: she didn’t want to have to explain to anyone what she was doing in Wrightsville Beach in the middle of the night.
She stepped on the gas pedal and took off across the intersection, speeding away from the man and his shouting, hoping she was disappearing into the darkness too quickly for him to be able to read her license plate number. When she was a few blocks away, she pulled into a deserted parking lot, turned off her car and sat very still, waiting for her heart to settle down. But as the beat slowed and steadied, the muscles in her back contracted into a knot that was tight and sharp and savage, and she knew that her betrayal of Tara was not all that would haunt her about this night.
30
Tara
Wilmington, North Carolina
2010
I hadn’t been in Sam’s office since before he died. Ian had brought two boxes of personal items to me a few weeks after his death and I wished he hadn’t bothered. The spare pair of sunglasses, a couple of business awards, framed photographs of Grace and me and other odds and ends—I would have just as soon not seen them. Now Emerson and I sat on the sofa in front of the windows in Sam’s old office waiting for Ian. Sam’s desk still had a monitor and keyboard on it, but nothing else. The only other things in the room besides the furniture were the floor-to-ceiling bookcases filled with law books and three gleaming wooden antique file cabinets. They were the file cabinets Ian had slowly been making his way through as he tried to determine which of Sam’s old cases needed his attention.
“You want something cold to drink?” he asked as he walked into the office. “Water? Soda?” He had a legal-size manila folder in his hands. It was neither thick nor thin. The edges were worn as though it had been beaten up a little over time.
“We’re good,” I said. I knew we both just wanted him to get to the point.
Ian sat down in one of the leather chairs in front of Sam’s desk. “Well.” He looked at me—apologetically, I thought. “Noelle continues to surprise us.”
“Ian,” Emerson said impatiently. “What did you find?”
He held up the folder. “This was with Sam’s old cases. The name on the file is Sharon Byerton. It’s a made-up name, I’m sure.”
“Why a made-up name?” I asked.
“I’ve done it myself,” Ian said. “If I’m working with a client whose identity I want to protect from anyone who might stumble across the file, I’ll give it a false name. When I opened the folder, though…” He shook his head. He wore an expression of disbelief, as if he still couldn’t fathom what he’d found inside. He opened the file now and I could see a stack of the heavy, creamy sort of paper Sam used for legal documents. “Remember Noelle’s so-called ‘rural work’?” he asked.
We nodded.
“She wasn’t practicing midwifery then,” he said, “except maybe on herself.”
“What are you talking about?” Emerson asked.
“These are contracts,” he said, holding the papers in the air. “She was a gestational surrogate.”
“A…?” The words wouldn’t come out of my mouth.
“Five times. When she went away to do her rural work, she was actually in Asheville or Raleigh or Charlotte, finishing the last few months of a pregnancy and turning over a baby to that child’s biological parents.”
I couldn’t speak and Emerson seemed to have lost her voice, as well. It was too much to take in. Way too much.
“How can this be?” Emerson looked at me. “How can this possibly be? Why would she do this?”
“Oh…my…God,” I said slowly. “Are you sure?”
Ian leaned forward to hand us each a contract. I looked down at the pages of legalese. There were the names of strangers in the blanks marked genetic father and genetic mother. Noelle’s name in the blank for embryo carrier. I looked up at Ian. “Who are these people?”
He shook his head. “I have no information other than what’s in those contracts. The contracts are well drafted, but they’re not your typical surrogacy contract, not that I’ve seen a lot of them. Usually surrogates are married and have children and the husband would sign the contract also. Of course, that’s not the case here. She went into each contract prior to the in vitro fertilization, which I’m glad to see. She covered herself carefully. Or, I guess, Sam did. In each case, the parents paid all her expenses, of course, plus fifteen thousand dollars, which is low for this sort of thing, but I could see Noelle thinking that was just fine. She didn’t have many personal expenses.”
“We didn’t charge her much rent.” Emerson’s voice was husky.
“There’s the usual restrictions on the surrogate not interfering with the raising of the child or ever trying to assert parental rights. And there’s—”
“When did she start doing this?” Emerson asked.
“The first contract was signed in April 1998.” He cleared his throat and looked down at the contracts in his lap, and when he spoke again, his voice was thick. “Usually there’s something in a surrogacy contract about a psychiatric evaluation of the surrogate, but there’s no provision for that here, and I…” His voice trailed off and he lowered his head, his hand rubbing his chin, his eyes glistening behind his glasses. I felt so sad for him. I stood and crossed the room to lean over to hug him.
“She wasn’t right, Ian,” I said. “Something was off with her and none of us saw it.”
“I want to talk to some of these parents,” Emerson said. “At least the last couple. Can I do that?”
Ian lifted his head again and squeezed my arm in a little thank-you gesture as he regained his composure. “I’ll contact them and see if they’re willing,” he said. I stood next to his chair, my hand still on his shoulder. My own eyes had misted over, not for Noelle but for him, and I realized that I cared about him more than I’d thought.
“We missed her being pregnant,” Emerson said. “Five times!”
“The way she dressed, she could cover up a lot,” I said.
“Could this be why she and Sam were meeting at the restaurant in Wrightsville Beach?” Emerson asked.
“Possibly,” Ian said. “Although the last contract was from 2007 and she was forty-four when she died, so I think she was…finished. It would be very rare for someone to hire a surrogate her age.”
“Well, they hired her unmarried and without children,” I said as I sat down next to Emerson again. “How could Sam do this?” I asked. I was stunned by Sam’s involvement and especially by the fact that he’d known something like this about Noelle when the rest of us were in the dark. “Wasn’t this unethical of him? Shouldn’t he have tried to stop her?”
“He probably did,” Ian said. “I’m guessing he saw the contracts as the only thing he could do for her. It looks to me as though every i was dotted and t was crossed.” He held up the folder in his hand. “It bothers me that she had psychological problems none of us knew about, but if she was determined to be a surrogate and she refused to get therapy, I have to trust that Sam was protecting her interests the best way he knew how. Through the contracts…” He opened the folder again. “He has no notes in the file about any meetings he had with her, but that’s not uncommon,” he said. “I often toss those notes myself, especially if it’s about something sensitive. The only thing other than the contracts in here is this.” He held up the folder itself, open to the inside back page. From where I sat, I could see something written in pencil, but I couldn’t make it out.
“What does it say?” I asked.
“Just one word with a question mark,” Ian answered. “Penance?”
31
Noelle
Wilmington, North Carolina
1993
She sat in the lounge of the women and newborn unit at the hospital, waiting for Tara. She was heartbroken, but trying to hold it together because the waiting area was full of anxious families and kids and she didn’t want to cry in front of them.
She’d left Emerson and Ted in the recovery room, where Emerson was still blissfully groggy after the D and C. Her first pregnancy had ended just before the twelve-week mark, but she’d made it eighteen weeks this time and everything had seemed to be going so well. Noelle would not agree to be her midwife the next time. It was hard enough going through pregnancy loss with one of her patients. With Emerson, the sadness was too much for her.
Tara nearly burst into the lounge, all energy and worry. “I ran a red light,” she said after giving Noelle a hug. “Where is she?”
“In recovery. Ted’s with her.”
Tara sank into the chair next to Noelle. Her dark blond hair was pulled up in a messy ponytail and she wore no makeup, a sure sign she’d rushed out of the house. “I can’t believe she has to go through this again,” she said. “It was so bad the last time, Noelle. This is going to be so much worse. I’m afraid for her.”
She was right. After her first miscarriage, Emerson had sunk into a dark depression that lasted weeks. She’d been unable to work in Ted’s real-estate office, which she’d been doing since before they were married. Unable to shop for groceries or straighten the house. Some days, she couldn’t even get out of bed in the morning.
“It’s the hormones,” Noelle said. “Postpartum depression. She may need some medication to get through it this time. I asked Ted if I could move in for a while and he’s all for it.”
“Oh, fantastic!” Tara grabbed her hand. “That would be such a relief to know you’re there. I can bring meals over.”
“Good,” Noelle said. “We’ll take care of her together.” She shifted her weight in the chair. Her back was seizing up as it did regularly ever since the accident. Sometimes it was impossible to find a position that didn’t hurt.