Chapter Two

      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 using Winston’s sperm when he isn’t here to father his child. Or have any say in whether or not he has a fatherless child in the world.”

      Christine’s statement hit home. Hard. “I didn’t say that.”

      “You kind of did.”

      Not in so many words...but she’d rambled a lot and... “I guess that’s part of it,” she said, clasping her hands together in her lap, slumping some, too, but still not leaning back against the couch. “Is it fair to the child? To bring him or her into a single-parent home?”

      “You know these are questions only you can answer.”

      But that didn’t mean she liked that truth.

      “A lot of people have disagreed with choices I’ve made in my life,” Christine continued. “One of them was choosing to use my mother’s money to build this clinic when I could have gone on to med school, or been a lawyer, or had any other life. But for me, this clinic is a part of her, and using my life to keep her legacy alive, to actually be able to give other people what she wanted most—the chance to have babies—this was my right choice. I’m happier today than I’ve been since I was ten and lost her.”

      Emily believed her.

      “You have to make your right choice,” Christine’s words fell softly between them. “I could tell you what I think, or give you pros and cons, but you’ve done a pretty stellar job of arguing both sides all on your own.”

      No disputing that one.

      “You know the paperwork you and Winston signed when you started with us gives you permission for the use of his sperm.”

      She knew. Of course she knew. Her, and only her. That had been important to them.

      “How do I know this is the choice he’d have wanted me to make?”

      Therein was the crux of her self-torture. They’d never talked about one of them carrying on without the ever. It hadn’t been an option for them. Or a possibility she’d ever considered.

      Hard to believe she’d ever been that naive.

      “He’s not here, Emily. You think my mother would choose for me to be living alone in her parents’ home, dedicating my life to work? You think she’d choose for me to never