insemination. Because they’d both just turned thirty and figured they had time, they’d opted to go the natural route for a while longer, but had paid to have Winston’s sperm stored just in case.
“So what can I do for you?” Christine’s question came quietly. More of a boost than a push. Like she was helping Emily do what she’d come to do, not forcing her to get on with it.
“I’ve become obsessed by an idea I had and I want your opinion before I allow myself to seriously consider it.”
“Why me? I’m not a counselor—Though, as you know, we have a couple of top-rate ones on staff, and I’d be happy to refer you...”
Emily shook her head. Maybe a counselor was what she needed but it wasn’t what she wanted. Not at that point, anyway.
“I want your opinion.”
“My degree is in health management. I founded the clinic, I run it, but the work that we do...that’s the fabulous doctors and their teams, not me.”
“When we met with you before...it was clear to me...you aren’t in this as a business. You’re here because you care about people.”
With a silent nod, Christine acknowledged the truth of the remark.
“And...you understand that sometimes, for some people, the need to have a family, by whatever means, overrides most everything else...”
“Whatever legal means...” Christine said slowly, her look more assessing. “What are you considering?”
“Nothing illegal.” Emily tried to smile and chuckle. She choked instead. And when Christine brought her a bottle of water, she took down half of it. “I’m sorry.”
Taking the seat next to her on the couch, Christine turned to her. “I’m happy to listen.”
Emily rambled for what seemed like an hour. She just talked. Unburdening herself of myriad thoughts. Relaying arguments that played out in her head. Releasing a little bit of the panic that had become an almost-constant companion over the past month. She wasn’t looking for healing. For therapy. Truth was, she wasn’t sure what she was looking for. Permission maybe.
She wanted some kind of professional response from the health care manager, as though such a response would validate the seemingly unstoppable urge to have herself inseminated.
The clock on the wall said only about ten minutes had passed when she finally fell silent.
“You have the legal right to use your husband’s sperm.” Christine’s response sounded professional. And maybe more, too.
She didn’t need the other woman’s pity. She had so much of that coming at her she was almost buried in it.
“Everyone I know is feeling sorry for me,” she blurted. “I’m attempting to prevent myself from sinking into the pool they’re creating and letting it drown the life out of me. And yet is it fair to bring a child into the world because I’m drowning in grief?”
“Is that why you’d be doing it? Because of the grief?”
It was obvious, wasn’t it? That’s what everyone would think. Would assume. Including her.
“When I met with you before it seemed to me that you and Winston were equally determined to have a child. That it was something you both needed in equally intense measure.”
“It was!” Why would the woman be going back there at this point in time? That dream, that life, was over.
“And your desire to be a mother, to raise a family, do you think that died with your husband?”
“Of course not. If it had, having a child wouldn’t assuage the grief now, would it?” She heard the sarcasm in her tone. Was ashamed of it. And kind of relieved to know that she had fight left in her, too.
Christine stared at her. Expecting her to get something?
“My mother died when I was ten, trying to have the sibling I so badly wanted, the son my father wanted,” Christine stated a few moments later. “She was forty at the time. Because my father worked eighty hours a week, he left me with my grandparents...”
“The grandmother who was diabetic.” Emily’s turmoil settled, desperation eased for a second, as she saw again the high school girl leaving at lunchtime.
Christine nodded. “Other things happened that don’t bear going into right now, but ultimately, at twenty-two, I was alone, without any close family, and only the money left to me from my mother’s life insurance policy.”
And here Emily had been wallowing in her own pity. Compassion spread through her instead.
“I’d spent the previous twelve years fighting off grief, eschewing all the pity, desperately grasping sometimes, and there I was, a college graduate with a degree in health management, thinking I’d go on to med school as my mother had...”
“Your mother was a doctor? Here in Marie Cove?” Their little town wasn’t all that well known, had no public beach access, but though it had only been incorporated for a couple of decades, it had been around more than a century and had enough of a population that not everyone knew one another.
“A pediatrician,” Christine said. “Children were her life.”
And she died trying to give birth to one. Emily wasn’t sure where Christine was going with this, but for the first time since she’d received word that her husband had been declared legally dead, Emily felt a sense of...calm. And maybe a wee bit of strength, too.
“I had a choice to make,” Christine said. “I could take that money, leave Marie Cove, start a new life for myself, a family of my own, or I could stay here in the town where I was born, in the home where I grew up, and use my mother’s money to honor her life and the importance of children to families. To make it easier for women like her, and others, too, to have the children they need to feel complete. To give couples that chance.”
The fertility clinic.
Emily wanted to take the other woman’s hand. To thank her somehow, though nothing in her life was any different than it had been moments ago. “What happened to your father?”
“He met a woman in LA, ten years older than me, twenty younger than him, remarried, had his son. And another daughter, too. They never asked me to live with them, but honestly, even if they had, I’d have chosen to stay with my grandparents.”
“Do you see them? Your dad and his family? Your half brother and sister?”
“Once or twice a year. For an hour or so over a meal, usually. I never got along with his new wife. Probably somewhat my fault. But on the other hand, he never tried all that hard to bridge the gap.”
Certain that there was a lot more Christine wasn’t saying, Emily thought over what she had said. Searching for its application to the current situation.
“You’re worried about the morality of
