She arrives home and lets herself in. She’s grateful for the blast of air-conditioning – it’s so humid today. They live in a lovely house; her husband makes a very good living in commercial property development. Maybe she’ll make herself an iced coffee and go out and sit by their pool.
But for some reason, she finds herself thinking about the past. She makes her way upstairs to Devin’s bedroom and opens his door. She’s seen some of the bedrooms of Devin’s friends. They make her shudder. The other moms complain about how messy and lazy their kids are, but Cheryl thinks maybe they aren’t bringing their kids up properly. Kids need boundaries, expectations. Good parenting is so important. She and Gary make Devin tidy his room every weekend.
She looks at his bed, with the quilt with the aeroplanes on it. Devin has always loved aeroplanes. He wants to be a pilot someday. She thinks maybe there’s nothing he can’t do. How ambitious she is for him – she hardly likes to admit it to herself, how invested she is in him – perhaps because he’s an only child. She often daydreams about his future – what it will be like for him, and what it will be like for them as his parents. He’ll have every advantage. Her eyes fall on his dresser, which has several trophies on it: for athletics, soccer, hockey. His closet is full of sports equipment, his walls plastered with posters of favourite sports figures.
She searches his bookshelf for the photo album. She pulls it out and sits down on his bed. Why is she looking at this today? She thinks she knows why. There’s a reason her mind has turned to the past.
She opens the small album, which has a few baby pictures, carefully selected, printed and glued into it. Photos are all digital these days, but she wanted a proper album of Devin growing up. She studies the very first photograph – a picture of him in the hospital, right after he was born. He’s all red and scrunched up and wearing a blue knitted bonnet. Cheryl and Gary hadn’t been there, at the hospital. They’d waited at home, eager for news, terrified that the birth mother would hold her newborn in her arms for the first time and change her mind like the last one had.
Because this woman, Erica, who they’d been so taken with in the beginning, had begun to make them feel uneasy. At first it was little things. She’d had an extra cost when her car had broken down – could they cover it so she could get to her medical appointments? Of course they expected to pay her regular expenses – her rent and groceries and maternity clothes and so on. Erica had given up her job, after all, for the health of the baby. She told them she’d been working part time at a dry cleaner and she’d read that the chemicals might cause birth defects, so she’d quit as soon as she found out she was pregnant.
And then, one day late in her pregnancy, she’d dropped by to see them, at their home. This was unexpected and not really done. She hinted that she really needed money, or ‘she didn’t know what she would do.’ Cheryl and Gary had been deeply unsettled. They asked delicately what she needed the money for. She explained that it was for her education, or she might have to give up her dream of going to medical school and instead raise her child herself. She asked for a hundred thousand dollars.
Stunned, they left Erica sitting in their living room while they retreated to the kitchen to make her some herbal tea and discuss the problem in hushed tones.
‘What are we going to do?’ Cheryl whispered to her husband, in distress. She was starting to cry. Meanwhile, Erica sat in their living room, huge with their child, waiting serenely for her herbal tea while shaking them down for a huge amount of money.
‘We have the money,’ Gary said. ‘Let’s just pay her.’
Cheryl felt the blood drain from her face. ‘But it’s illegal – you know that! We can’t pay her more than the allowed expenses.’ She added, ‘We have to tell the agency.’
Her husband looked grim and said, ‘No, we don’t. She’s not going to tell anybody, or she could go to jail. Nobody has to know.’
‘But – what if we pay her and then she doesn’t let us have the baby?’ Cheryl cried.
‘That’s a chance we have to take,’ Gary said. ‘Do you want this baby or not?’
‘Yes, of course I do.’
‘So do I.’
They returned with the tea tray and Cheryl’s husband offered to write her a cheque.
Erica said it might be better if he got it for her in cash.
Miraculously, Erica hadn’t changed her mind. She’d taken the cash, and later, after the baby was born, willingly signed the papers terminating all parental rights to her child. She told them that she’d decided she didn’t want to maintain contact with them and the baby after all; she thought it would be easier if she didn’t. They’d been relieved to hear it, though of course they hadn’t said so. The period allowed for her to change her mind passed, Devin was theirs, and she disappeared from their lives. But before she left, she’d given them a copy of the birth photo, and Cheryl had treasured it.
She looks at it now, thinking back to that time, almost nine years ago. She’s remembering it now, because after all this time, she’s afraid that Erica might be back. Cheryl thought she saw her a couple of weeks ago, in the park, watching Devin kick a ball around, and she had a camera around her neck. But she was gone before Cheryl could be sure.
CHAPTER SIX
ERICA SHOWERS, DRESSES in a short black skirt and silky sky-blue blouse, and applies her make-up carefully. She studies herself in the mirror, pleased, thinking about the meeting with Patrick the day before.
She hadn’t really known what to expect. It’s been a long time. He was looking good, she has to admit. Older, of course, but he’s the kind of man who looked better with a bit more maturity. His tall frame had filled out a bit. His dark hair was shorter, nicely cut, and he’d been wearing an expensive-looking suit.
He hadn’t been happy about her showing up at his firm, that was obvious. He was nervous; that was obvious too. He’s probably afraid of her coming back into his life, afraid of the old attraction firing up again, getting between him and his new wife. Maybe he should be afraid. He never could keep it in his pants.
Her attractiveness has always been one of her best weapons.
Patrick struggles all morning at the office, unable to concentrate. He notices that Niall is humming quietly to himself, which only irritates Patrick. Around lunchtime he hears Niall leave his office and talk to Kerri at the front desk on his way out.
From his window, Patrick stares out at the river, his mind dull. He has so much work to do, but instead he thinks about how Erica had come to his office, pretending she didn’t know him, when she’d known he was here all along. She’d deliberately put him in an awkward position.
Yesterday, he’d casually asked Niall how the interview went and Niall had said, ‘She’s not the best candidate,’ and Patrick had felt relief. She wouldn’t be back in the office. He will never have to explain that they actually know each other, although they hadn’t let on. And she’s not interested in the job anyway.
He rises from his chair and walks tiredly over to his draughting table. He’s working on a high-end new build of a house for a prominent doctor, and he needs to focus.