A Mother's Secrets (Parent Portal 4)

She had no idea what to do about it.

Except do what she did. Listen. Try to understand. To help. At the very least to empathize. To consider his suggestion fairly, compile the logical reasons she couldn’t comply, and then move on with her day. To the next “Jamison Howe” or Emily Hannigan, a former classmate of Jamison’s who had also been a client of The Parent Portal.

Life wasn’t easy.

But it had moments of pure rightness. Of complete joy. Christine could attest to that.

She wanted him to have his child. Wanted to help him. Would help him. Once she got him past the whole “her carrying his baby” thing. It wasn’t the first time she’d been asked. Was something she’d actually considered a few years back. But with her clinic, her position there, surrogacy had muddied her waters too much. There were a lot of great surrogates out there. She’d had clients at The Parent Portal who, after finding their own, had come to the clinic for the insemination, prenatal care and birth.

“I planned to give you a list of many such instances in my life with Emily, times when she’d say something and then it would come to be in one fashion or another, but there’s only one that matters here,” Dr. Howe said. The man was handsome from the hair on his head on down. His eyes. The deep timbre of his voice. The way he held his torso when he spoke—not upright straight, and yet seemingly straight. Relaxed, but no slouch...

“After we left here the day we met with you, she said that if it came to the last resort and we had to use a surrogate, it had to be you.”

“She meant The Parent Portal, but I clearly misrepresented us to the two of you that day. We don’t provide surrogates. I mean, we could. We just don’t. I run a fertility clinic that insists on open family agreements, not a surrogacy clinic. I think it’s best to specialize, and our specialty is not surrogacy.”

“You told us you’d given your son up for adoption.”

She stared at him. Had completely forgotten she’d told them. But now that he mentioned it... Emily had told her that she’d felt so strongly about using The Parent Portal because of the clinic’s policy of acknowledging its patients and their needs, in the present and in the future. The woman had looked her in the eye, smiled and asked Christine if she’d ever had a child.

She hadn’t prevaricated, even though she always did. But that day she hadn’t. It was the first time since she gave her son up at seventeen that she hadn’t. She’d told the Howes about the six-pound baby boy she’d loved so fiercely during his time inside her and then given to a family who’d desperately wanted a child of their own. Every day since, she’d been glad she made that choice, giving her son a family rather than bringing him into a home where his teenage mother was a nursemaid to her elderly grandparents.

“Emily said that we’d be doing you a favor by using you as our surrogate because it would help you to allow yourself to have another child.”

He might as well have hit her on the head with a baseball bat.

It would have been kinder.

Chapter Three

Jamie wasn’t all that surprised when Christine asked him to leave. The look of blank horror on her face had preceded her abrupt request.

He didn’t blame her. As soon as he’d heard himself repeat what Emily had said to him over two years before, he’d known he’d made a huge mistake.

The personal remark, the reference to Christine’s own child, had been totally out of line. Definitely not in his rehearsed rhetoric. But then nothing about the afternoon meeting had gone as he’d imagined it might.

At the door to her office, he turned, surprised at the tears he saw brimming in her eyes as she turned away from him. “I’m sorry,” he said, knowing that t

here was no taking back what he’d said. “Emily and I had no business talking about you as if we knew you. And we really didn’t, actually. Sit and talk about you, I mean. She just made that one statement and we moved on. I have no idea why it stuck with me. I certainly never meant to repeat it to you,” he added. And when she didn’t immediately remind him that he’d been uninvited from their meeting, he continued.

“I got carried off course, and absolutely didn’t mean to imply that Emily was right in that particular assertion. Or to make you think that I think she was some kind of gifted seer who was always right. She wasn’t. She was wrong a lot...” Like when she’d told him that buying their house was the absolute best thing for them to do. He was in the process of putting it on the market so that he could buy his way out of it and move on.

“I was only letting you know why I felt so strongly about asking you to be our surrogate. That statement from her is the only weigh-in on the matter I’m going to get from her.”

Christine was sitting back in her chair, hands folded across a completely flat midsection. Ignoring him politely, freezing him out of there? Or listening?

“I’m certain about doing this, about having our family. I have no doubts or apprehensions at all. But finding a woman to carry Emily’s child? How do I do that? How do I choose a woman to give birth to the child that my wife conceived and wanted more than anything on earth? It’s not like I’m looking for someone to clean the house, here. Or bake my favorite cookies.”

“You’d also be looking for someone to provide child care. Which you will presumably need to do after the baby is born as well. For now, you need a caretaker who’s willing to do the job 24/7, internally.”

His hand dropped from the doorknob.

She was engaging with him?

Should he still leave? Or was it appropriate for him to stay? Was there any chance she’d consider his request?

“Do you have a projected date for implantation in mind?” Her question had him leaning toward sticking around, but he didn’t move away from the door.

“Soon,” he said. “I have no date, no. I’d just like to get started on the process as soon as possible simply because I’m eager to have a family. I’m thirty-three,” he ended, as though his age played some key role. It was Emily’s biological clock that had mattered. Yeah, he’d like to be young enough to charge up hills with his offspring, but he expected to be able to do that for the next four decades, at the very least.