He kissed her with a desperation she hadn’t seen from him before then, as if his life—and maybe hers—depended upon this kiss and these halting steps toward something significant.
“You won’t be sorry,” he whispered against her lips. “I swear to God, you’ll never be sorry you took a chance on me.”
She could only hope that would be true.
* * *
Lizzie moved around the kitchen, preparing dinner with the baby in a sling Abby McCarthy had sent over that kept the baby snug against Lizzie’s chest. She hummed a random tune while she chopped vegetables for the kabobs, while Jared tended to the marinated chicken and beef on the grill.
“This is how it could be,” she whispered to the baby. “The three of us together forever, getting ready to have friends over for dinner.”
In her mind, she’d given the baby a name: Violet. Or Vi for short. Only because a child shouldn’t be almost a week old and not have a name. Her attachment to the baby already ran deep and was getting deeper by the minute. Lizzie couldn’t find the wherewithal to care that she was probably heading for the worst kind of broken heart.
In her rational mind, Lizzie knew Jessie would come back for the baby or make other arrangements for her, and Lizzie would have to give her up. In her irrational mind, she was already planning the baby girl’s first birthday party and dreaming of the mother-daughter things they might do together, such as tea at the Plaza in New York, along with stops at FAO Schwarz and the American Girl store.
She couldn’t wait to do everything fun with her little girl.
Lizzie would no sooner have that sort of thought when the black cloud of doom would descend once again to remind her the baby strapped to her chest didn’t belong to her and might be taken from her at any moment. Every time Jared’s phone rang, Lizzie held her breath, waiting to hear if this was going to be the call from Jessie that would force her to give baby Vi back to her mother.
No, Lizzie wanted to cry. I’m her mother. I’m the one who’s fed her and changed her and bathed her and rocked her to sleep and walked the floor with her for hours when she was fussy.
Jared came in from the patio, carrying a platter with grilled meat. His instructions had been to cook it until it was about half done. Then she would add the veggies and put the skewers together. “Want me to take her so you can do your thing?”
Lizzie’s immediate, visceral reaction was to say no and put her arms around the baby so neither he nor anyone could take her. But she couldn’t do that. Jared was already worried about how attached she’d gotten. She couldn’t let him see just how far gone she was over the baby who’d turned her life upside down in the span of a few momentous days. “Sure,” Lizzie said reluctantly.
She unwrapped the sling and handed the baby over to him, her heart melting at the sight of Jared holding the little one in his big strong arms.
His phone rang, stopping Lizzie’s heart as usual. Turning so his back was to her, he said, “Can you get that out of my pocket for me?”
Lizzie pulled the phone from his pocket and handed it to him, noting the investigator’s name on the caller ID.
“Hey, Mike. What’s up?” Jared listened for a full minute while Lizzie died inside the way she did every time he talked to the man who was trying to find Jessie. “Did she say anything?”
Oh God. Had he found her?
“All right. Keep me posted. Great job.” Jared ended the call and put the phone on the counter. “He found her.”
“Wh-where?”
“New Bedford. I guess that’s where she’s from, and he tracked her to her grandmother’s house. She’s agreed to talk to him in the morning, but because he doesn’t trust her not to bolt, he’s staked out at the house.”
Lizzie felt like she was going to be sick, so she sat at the kitchen table and focused on trying to get oxygen to lungs that felt constricted.
“It’s good news that he found her.”
She wanted to agree with him, but couldn’t.
“Sweetheart, look at me.”
Lizzie forced herself to meet his gaze.
“We knew this wasn’t forever.”
Lizzie shook her head almost involuntarily as everything in her rejected that statement.
“Please don’t do this.”
Her hands were shaking so hard, she had to tuck them under her legs so he wouldn’t see them shake. “I would like for you to ask Mike to ask her if we might keep her. Permanently.”
“Lizzie… The baby is Jessie’s. We can’t just come right out and ask her to give us her baby.”
“Why not? She already did! What’s wrong with asking her if we can make the arrangement legal? It would be like… like surrogacy, only after the fact. Don’t tell me we can’t work something out with her.”
“And what do we do in a month or three months or six months when she changes her mind and wants her back?”
“We make it so she can’t do that. If she signs her over to us, it’s permanent. Of course we’d let Jessie visit and see her, and I’d send her pictures, but the custody arrangement would be forever. Don’t act like this can’t work. You’re the one who suggested it in the first place.”
Jared took a deep breath and let it out. “Let me call Dan and see what he says.”
Lizzie’s heart surged from the depths of despair to the heights of joy in one second, leaving her feeling as if she’d had the wind knocked out of her.
“But please, Lizzie. Please don’t get your hopes up until we know what our options are.”
Lizzie didn’t tell him her hopes were already as high as the sky and heading for outer space. She reached for the baby and held her close, praying with all her might that they could work something out. Because losing her wasn’t an option anymore.
“Put it on speaker so I can hear him, too,” Lizzie said.
Jared put through the call to Dan Torrington.
“Hey, Jared,” Dan said when he answered. “How’s it going?”
“Pretty well. Thanks for taking my call so late in the day, Dan.”
While Jared detailed the latest in the situation for Dan, Lizzie got up, put the baby back in the sling and forced herself to finish making dinner, while trying to get her hands to stop shaking. When Jared got to the part about Lizzie’s idea to propose a custody arrangement to Jessie, Lizzie turned toward Jared. “Is something like that legally possible, Dan?”
“Anything is possible if all parties agree to it.”
“In that case,” Jared said, “I have a huge ask. Could you draft something for us tonight that our investigator could propose to Jessie tomorrow?”
“I have a boilerplate custody agreement I could adapt for this. It wouldn’t be a big deal to get that done tonight, but I just wonder if the mother is in the right frame of mind to sign something like that, and we’d need information about who the father is, too, because he’d be required to sign as well.”
Lizzie’s spirits plummeted again.
“I have no information about her state of mind or who the father is, but I can have Mike talk to her and get a sense of what she’s thinking. Our only request is if she and the father sign over their rights to us, they need to understand it’s a permanent arrangement. They can’t come back in a year or two or whatever and ask for her back.”