years younger than he was, she’d been ready for a long time, but Glenn had stood firm, as always. He wasn’t ready to share her with a baby yet. He wanted her all to himself. He still had career goals to accomplish. He didn’t want to be tied down and woken in the night. She had pretended to herself for years that she understood those reasons, and that she didn’t mind.
She just wished she hadn’t let Brady Buchanan in on the secret. There had been some dissatisfactions in her marriage before Glenn’s illness. For the sake of the deeper connection they’d made with each other during those last months when Glenn had softened so much, however, she kept those to herself.
It seemed weird to be talking on such a personal level with Brady, a near-stranger, but discovering that you shared twin daughters with a man cut through some of the usual barriers.
Some of them.
In other areas, she felt even more wary, and more protective of secrets and doubts and resolutions.
She went on quickly, “Then his cancer was diagnosed, and that was the end of it. With the type of cancer and treatment he had, there was no possibility of getting another chance to conceive once his treatment was over, even if he had survived.”
“That must have been tough.”
“It was. A double loss, in a lot of ways. My husband, and my chance for a child that was his. Even so, it took me a long time to decide on adoption. I knew it would be a major undertaking on my own.”
“Stacey and I tried to have a baby for eight years,” Brady said. “Deciding to go for an intercountry adoption gave us the best year of our marriage.”
It didn’t quite make sense. They’d only had Scarlett for two or three months before his wife’s death. He must have been including the months before that.
Libby couldn’t agree on those months being good ones in her own case. Although she’d appreciated the need for all the bureaucratic red tape in two countries, in order to ensure that children were willingly given up to responsible adoptive parents, she’d found the actual process of it—the waiting and the uncertainty—quite gruelling.
She’d had to list every address she’d had in her adult life, every organization she’d ever belonged to, and every job she’d ever had. She’d been allowed to choose the sex and approximate age of the child she hoped for, but that was all. Brady and Stacey must have been through the same thing.
She’d spent weeks in fear that her application would snag and fail on some small detail, and weeks more, before her flight to Vietnam, panicking that she might not be able to bond with the child who’d been chosen for her.
She couldn’t imagine how those had been good months in Brady’s life, but maybe it was a very different process if you weren’t going through it alone.
“So, if you moved because of your husband’s job, that means you don’t have parents or siblings here, right?” he asked, while she was still thinking about his last statement.
“No, no siblings anywhere,” she told him.
His gray, thoughtful gaze was still fixed on her, and she found it unsettling. His questions were like an interview, or a test. For the sake of Colleen and Scarlett, she hid her growing anger and discomfort. What was he angling toward?
“I’m an only child,” she explained.
“Me, too.”
“My parents divorced when I was in grade school, as I said. My mother’s still in Chicago, and my Dad died when I was eighteen.”
“I’m sorry to hear that.”
“Yes, it was hard,” she answered. It wasn’t something she let herself think about.
“But at least you have your mother, not so far away.”
“Far enough!”
Mom hadn’t visited since Colleen’s adoption. She’d sent gifts, and she talked about coming, but she hadn’t made it yet. Mom was a cautious, conservative person, slow to adjust to new situations. How would she deal with the news of Colleen’s twin?
“And what about your husband’s parents?” Brady asked.
“They’re in Florida. We were never all that close, and I’ve lost touch with them since Glenn’s death.”
It all sounded too arid and distant. She knew that, and wondered what Brady would think. It wasn’t her fault. She’d called Glenn’s parents and sent cards for birthdays and anniversaries and holidays. But if they were out when she called and she left a message, they never called back. They never sent cards in return, and when she’d told them about her plan to adopt a Vietnamese baby, she could practically hear the ice crackling down the phone. They’d considered her action an affront to their son’s memory.
This was when she’d given up. She and Colleen would go on putting down their roots here in St. Paul. They had a great house in a great neighborhood. She had good friends she’d made over the past ten years, and more friends she’d begun to make with other mothers since adopting Colleen. They were both happy at the day-care center, and she’d begun to consider schools for her daughter’s education later on.
Brady was looking at her as if all of this—this failure, this distance, this determined independence—was scrolling across her forehead like a TelePrompTer, and as if it said as much about who she was as did her taste in clothes. It probably did.
Their pizza arrived, along with salad and soda pop for the adults. Brady took a knife, cut a slice of pizza into bite-sized pieces for Scarlett, then used it to lift a second slice onto Libby’s plate, while she was occupied in helping Colleen. He had big hands, but he used them well, with sure, economical movements.
Sliding a third slice onto his own plate, he got some sauce on his forefinger and casually wiped it into his mouth.
“You said you didn’t want to wait before we talked,” he said. “Does that mean you already know what you want to do?”
“It means I know what we have to do,” she corrected him quickly. “As I see it, Brady, there’s no choice.”
She took a small bite of the hot, crisp slice, but her appetite didn’t respond. Her stomach was far too churned up to feel hungry, and she was nauseous. She had a deep, instinctive dread of laying her emotional cards on the table like this, which she could never really understand. It wasn’t fair to blame Glenn and the patterns that had evolved during their marriage.
“Okay, so tell me.” Brady leaned forward a little, his face serious and steady.
“I don’t buy your point about visits and access, like after a divorce,” she began.
“No?” He looked as if he was sincerely ready to listen, and she liked that. Grabbed on to it hard, gritted her teeth, fought back the nausea, and hoped with her whole heart.
“These girls have already lost both their biological parents, whoever they were,” she went on. “During the adoption ceremony in Vietnam, we undertook to keep them in touch with their cultural heritage.”
“Yes, I remember that bit.”
“It’s
