What's Yours Is Mine (23 page)

Nicholas comes around his desk and presses a box of tissues into my hands, waiting patiently for me to bring my emotions under control, as if women burst into tears in his office on a regular basis; I suppose they do. He must see this all the time. Perhaps not in these exact circumstances, but how many parents—estranged fathers, tug-of-love mothers—has he had to console as they come to terms with the fact that they will no longer be a part of their child's daily life? How many times has he broken the news to a father that he will only be allowed to see the child he loved and protected for one day every other weekend? Or tell a mother whose babies have been whisked to the other side of the world that there's nothing she can do? My tragedy is overwhelming; but commonplace.

“The most important thing to determine is whether Tom is the father,” Nicholas says evenly, when I finally look up and nod for him to continue. I'm grateful that he doesn't attempt sympathy or kindness.

“A DNA test?”

He nods. “Unfortunately, we have to wait until the child is born before we can request a paternity test and discover if it's appropriate to apply for a Parental Order.”

“But she's only twenty-two weeks pregnant. The baby isn't due until Christmas. She could leave the country long before then and go back to America. I might never find her again!”

“I'm sorry, Grace, but our hands are tied.”

“What about amniocentesis?” I demand. “Susannah insisted on having the test, even though she's not high risk.
She's terrified of Down's. Can't you determine paternity from the amnio test?”

“Even assuming the sample is still available for testing—”

“She only had it done a few days ago. I paid for her to have it done privately,” I admit, correctly interpreting his look of surprise. “I know it's stupid, but I kept thinking, if I could show her I'd be a good mother, if I can prove how much I care …”

Nicholas returns to his side of the desk, and scribbles a note on his legal pad. “We would need Susannah's written agreement,” he warns. “We have no legal right to insist on a DNA test at this stage.”

“She'll agree. She's positive the baby is Blake's. She wants to prove that just as much as I want to prove it's Tom's.”

I know my sister. She's living in cloud cuckoo land. No doubt she's convinced herself Blake will leave Claudia—and Layla, and anyone else he's screwing—and run off into the sunset with her once he's sure the baby is his. Just as she's convinced herself she can be a good mother this time around.

“If she does agree to a DNA test, we may be able to set things in motion before the baby is born,” Nicholas says thoughtfully. “I would suggest an intermediary—perhaps your husband?—put it to her sooner rather than later. Once we have the results, we can take a view as to the next best step.”

I stand up and hand him a check for five thousand pounds, as his secretary requested. I just hope it doesn't bounce. “Your retainer,” I say.

He escorts me to the door, and then pauses. His gray eyes are filled with concern as he looks at me, and I wonder at the phenomenon: a lawyer who actually cares.

“Grace,” he says kindly, “I'm not going to bank this check yet. I want you to take some time to think about this. If we go into battle against your sister, it will get very dirty. Others will get dragged into the fight. People you care about will get hurt. If the baby
is
Tom's, we still face an uphill battle to take her from her mother. Even if you eventually win, there will be scars. You need to be very sure you want to go ahead before we press the button.”

Nicholas is a nice man, a decent man, but he has five children. He cannot possibly know what I have gone through just to get to this point.

It took me six months of trying even to acknowledge that a baby wasn't going to come as effortlessly to me as everything else in my life had done. And when I was finally, resentfully, forced to face the fact that I was going to have to
work
at it, I was determined to leave no stone unturned.

The moment I went online and stepped into the first trying-to-conceive—TTC—chatroom, I entered a different world. When you are trying to conceive, I mean
really
trying; when you have moved past the excited, nervous stage when you stopped trying to prevent it, when you
have started to count the days in your cycle and make notes on the calendar, when you are beginning to feel a little more nervous, a little less excited, with every month that passes—you join an elite, obsessive club that feeds off itself. There is even a special website devoted to home ovulation and pregnancy tests:
www.peeonastick.com
. Like so many of the sad, desperate clubs we know exist but hope never to join—the rape victims, the cancer survivors, those who have lost a child—the community has a language and a culture all its own, flowing beneath the surface of ordinary life like a river.

I learned to converse in the acronymic shorthand of the experts. I discovered the all-important “Day 3 FSH”: the follicle-stimulating hormone whose levels need to be in single digits when your blood is drawn and tested on the third day of your period, or no fertility clinic that values its IVF success rate will touch you. I bought a special OvuWatch to wear at night the week before I ovulated, to analyze my sweat so that I'd know the exact hour my egg was released into my fallopian tubes, ready to be fertilized. Every new vitamin or supplement or snake oil someone somewhere recommended, I added to the growing fist of pills I choked down every morning: black cohosh to boost estrogen, ginseng to lower my FSH, kelp to tone my pituitary gland so that it produced the right levels of the right hormones at the right times …

All of it pointless.

Rendered an outcast from the TTC club by my apocalyptic
no chance
diagnosis, I'd simply joined another: those desperate to adopt a child from anywhere, by any means. The day before Susannah had offered to be our surrogate, I'd actually emailed a girl in Tennessee who'd advertised her unborn child online. For less than the price of three Vuitton handbags, I could have bought her son.

I can't go back to that life. If I return to that obsessive, cloistered world, I'll never find my way back out. Susannah's baby needs me, and I need her. We were meant for each other.

I look Nicholas Lyon in the eye. “Bank the check,” I tell him.

“NO,” TOM SAYS
again.

We've been having this same argument for ten days. Nothing I've said has made Tom see reason. I'm running out of time. Susannah still won't even speak to me, and Tom stubbornly refuses to help. I don't want to take legal action against my own sister, but they're leaving me little choice.

“I'm just asking you to
talk
to her,” I plead, near to tears. “I just want you to see if she'll agree to the test. She doesn't even need to do anything; they already have the sample they need. Please, Tom. Just
ask
her.”

“Why won't you get it into your head?” Tom shouts. “I'm not going to agree, not to this, not to any of it! I don't give a damn
who
the father is! Susannah is this child's
mother
. That's all that counts!”

“But look at the kind of mother she is!” I cry. “You can't
possibly—
”

“Grace,” he bellows, “I am not going to wrench that child out of its mother's arms!”

The contempt in his face brings me up short. I don't think I've ever seen Tom look like that: not at me, not at anyone.

My heart folds over with fear. In the seventeen years we have been together, I have never once doubted that Tom and I will survive anything life throws at us. He is my constant. But before this baby is even born, she's created a gulf between us that's already wider than I'd ever have thought possible. For the first time, I'm beginning to realize that my solid, impregnable marriage is just as vulnerable as anyone else's.

I want to tell him I'm sorry and beg him to forgive me. I open my mouth, and choke on the words.

This baby has no one but me. Susannah doesn't really want her. If she did, she wouldn't be living the life she is, risking her child's health with her drinking and partying. If I thought it could be different … if I knew this little girl would be loved and looked after and cared for, that Susannah wouldn't change her mind one day down the line and run back to America without her … maybe I wouldn't feel so strongly.

Tom's never wanted her. He's not going to lift a finger to save her. I'm going to have to do it on my own.

Grace, forget the baby for five minutes, and think about your husband. Please, think about
Tom—

“What am I supposed to do now?” I demand. “You can't expect me to just
abandon
her!”

“You do what you have to,” Tom says coldly.

He picks up his jacket. “Where are you going?” I cry, running after him.

“In case you'd forgotten, your best friend has just given birth to our godson,” he snaps, “and we have promised to go and see him. We are going to tell her how beautiful her son is, and how wonderful she looks, and we are going to congratulate them and mean it.”

I take a step backwards, as if he's about to force me into the car. “I can't! Not after what's happened!”

“She is your
best friend
,” Tom says fiercely. He takes my linen summer coat and literally throws it at me. “If you insist on going ahead with this nonsense, you'll be throwing a hand grenade into Claudia's life as well as ours. You can't expect Blake's affair with your sister to stay a secret once you bring the lawyers in. Claudia may have turned a blind eye to Blake's other women, but another child will be a different matter.”

“Are you
defending
him?”

Tom looks at me for a long moment. “Does everything have to be a battle with you, Grace?” he says tiredly. “Can't you just forget about what
you
want for once and think about someone else?”

I'm shamed into silence. Tom is right. I've been so blinded by what's happening with Susannah, I'm missing things that matter. My best friend has just had a baby, and she needs me; even if she doesn't yet know it.

Chastened, I put our gifts for the baby in the boot of Tom's car. He doesn't even glance at me as he starts the engine. When we arrive at Blake and Claudia's smart Georgian house, he parks the car, climbs out, and walks briskly ahead of me as if I'm not even there.

Blake opens the door to us full of pride and bonhomie. I'm hard-pressed to smile back. He couldn't keep it in his trousers for five minutes. Because of him, I may lose my only chance at a child of my own. Susannah would never have reneged on the deal if she was certain the baby was Tom's. It's only because she thinks it might be Blake's that she's doing this. Doesn't she realize this selfish, overgrown schoolboy is never going to leave his comfortable, secure domestic setup for a peripatetic life with a flaky druggie?

Every time Blake puts his arm around Claudia's shoulders and says how proud he is, I want to vomit. I'm scarcely able to contain my relief when, after five minutes watching us coo dutifully over the new arrival, Blake invites Tom to wet the baby's head in his den.

“What's going on?” Claudia demands, as soon as Tom leaves the room. “Are you two not speaking?”

I shrug.

“Want to talk about it?”

“Nothing to talk about.” I lean over the Moses basket on the floor between us, teasing the baby's fingers with my index finger until he grasps it with surprising strength. “We had a bit of a row before we left, but it'll sort itself out.”

“About Susannah.” Claudia sighs.

“We've never argued like this before,” I admit. “It
frightens me, Claud. Sometimes he looks at me like he almost
hates
me. I'm scared I'll lose him.”

“Do you want a baby that much?”

“It's not just about what I want,” I say, “not anymore. If I thought Susannah had changed, it'd be different. But I can't let this baby end up in foster care, lost in the system, which is what'll happen, sooner or later. I can't do it, not even for Tom.” I shake myself and change the subject. “Anyway, you look
wonderful
. No one would ever guess you'd just had a baby.”

She smiles. “He was a walk in the park compared to the twins. Four hours, start to finish. Maybe it's because he was a couple of weeks early. I was in labor for thirty-six hours with the girls. I thought I was going to die. You have
no
idea how lucky you—Oh, God.” She covers her mouth, aghast. “Oh,
Grace
. I'm so sorry, I didn't mean—”

“Forget it.”

“I didn't think. I'm a complete
idiot.
”

“I think you're amazing,” I say honestly.

Claudia hesitates. “Would you like to hold him?”

My arms are reaching out for the baby before she's even finished speaking. Claudia scoops him out of his basket and hands him to me, and I cradle his tiny head in the cup of my hand, nestling him in the crook of my arm. I can feel the ache in my empty womb, as physical as a punch to the stomach. The baby turns his head into my chest, snuffling for a nipple, and I want to howl with misery. I look at Claudia, unable to speak. Holding this child is simply too overwhelming.

“Maybe Susannah will change her mind,” Claudia says softly. “Just give her a little time.”

“Tom says I should stop asking her,” I whisper thickly. I stroke the baby's dark quiff of hair against my cheek. “He never really wanted a baby. Not this way. I shouldn't have pushed him into it. He's not prepared to fight for her. He thinks she belongs with Susannah.”

“But she's his baby, too!” Claudia cries indignantly. “Sorry, Grace. I know it's none of my business, but he can't just wipe the slate clean and pretend she doesn't exist!”