Olivia had already been seeing Martin.
“I was so desperate to be a good mother to you, to show you that I would be there for you, that I fear I made a grave error,” Sylvia was saying now. Reminding Olivia that the conversation had started with the idea that Sylvia had made a mistake. And that it somehow had to do with Martin.
“After Lily died, you were so broken, Liv. So lost. I was like a mama bear, ready to do whatever it took to ease your pain. To help you recover...”
She remembered. There’d been a night or two when the darkness had consumed her and only pain seemed real, and then Sylvia had suddenly appeared in her room, with a soft touch, no words, just...there... She was pretty sure Sylvia had saved her life. She was certain her mother had saved her sanity. Which was how they’d become so close.
“The thing is, as I look back, I fear that it was about me then, too. I was so determined to be a good mom that I didn’t step back and let you and Martin find your way together. Instead, I took over you and left him to deal with his grief on his own.”
It hadn’t been exactly that way, of course. She and Martin had spent weeks in that house in LA after Lily died. Arguing. Needing. Unable to provide. But Olivia could understand her mother’s point.
“If I hadn’t been there, so determined to hold you up, you and Martin would have turned to each other more.”
Thinking back, Olivia could see some truth in her mother’s words. Some.
“He didn’t need me, Mom. Martin has never needed me.”
And she hadn’t realized how much that hurt, or even how significant a problem it had been for her until recently when, for the first time in their relationship, she’d suddenly felt, for a minute or two, that she could help him.
“Maybe he needed you and didn’t get a chance to let you see that because I was so protective of you. Maybe he needed you and I was so busy making you take care of yourself, I didn’t let you take care of him.”
She didn’t know what to say. Couldn’t really argue her mother’s point, because...well, there might have been some truth in it.
Ultimately, it changed nothing. She and Martin were still too opposite, wanting different things out of life, defining happiness differently, and yet... Sylvia’s perspective made a difference.
“Is that why you won’t go with us to the Applegates’ on Friday?” she asked. “Because I think you should. If this baby makes it...you’re going to be a grandmother and—”
With her hand on Olivia’s, Sylvia silenced her. “I’ll be the best damned grandmother any baby could hope to have, sweetie, but right now, I have to be the best mom I can be. And that means being here for you, putting you first, always, and stepping back when that means allowing you to have the best life you can have.”
The words rang too true of her childhood. And yet...how did Sylvia know what would have been best for her then? She’d been a kid herself.
“Are you abandoning me again?” she asked, half joking. But not entirely.
“Never.” Sylvia’s eyes filled with tears. “You are always first with me, Olivia. Never doubt that. No matter what. You and what you need come first with me. As Lily did with you. And—” her mother’s gaze deepened “—as this new baby will for you. It’s time for you to allow your heart to open up to all of the possibilities that life is offering.”
She was open. As open as she could be. She hadn’t taken the morning-after pill. She’d asked for the embryo transfer. And she’d had sex with Martin again.
But, just like her mother getting pregnant at sixteen, and Olivia growing up feeling abandoned, just like having a uterus that had failed to properly nourish her baby, and having a beautiful, precious daughter who’d suffered and died, having infant patients who died, there were some things in life that weren’t perfect. There were some things you just couldn’t fix.
* * *
What in the hell was he going to do with a Madonna and child pendant?
Martin had pulled it out of his pocket as soon as he was in his vehicle. Locking it in the glove box. And then went for it again when he got home—taking it into his bedroom, dropping it into the nightstand drawer.
He never should have bought it. Wasn’t sure what had possessed him to do so.
A mother and child. Yeah, Olivia and...Lily? Olivia and the new baby?
What did it matter? They didn’t exchange gifts.
But he wasn’t planning to take it back, either.
Most of that evening he returned business calls from overseas. Made plans for the new year. Turned down an invitation from Victoria when she called to ask if he wanted to meet for drinks.
Telling her no hadn’t been easy, but he felt so much better after he’d done so—effectively, in his mind, closing the door on future relationships for himself—that he went into the shower and then had an early night. Even if he was just watching television, he could rest.
Was feeling ready to do so.
He had to be in Marie Cove early, was picking Olivia up at home so they could drive to the ultrasound together. He’d never been to the clinic and hadn’t wanted her to be alone. Hopefully the appointment would turn out well. There was no reason to think that it wouldn’t. No sign that anything could be wrong.
But just in case, he didn’t want Olivia to have to drive if they got bad news.
If there was no heartbeat.
When Olivia texted after ten on Wednesday night, suggesting that she and Martin meet at the Parent Portal instead of her place the next morning, he got disgruntled all over again.
She was pushing him away again. Keeping him firmly on the outside of any emotional needs she might have. Building the damned wall ever higher.
The pendant in the drawer next to him mocked him. When had he become such a sentimental old fool?
Even if all went well—and he fully suspected it would—she’d have to feel some fallback from the fact that it would be Beth, not herself, on that table, her insides projected to the monitor. Watching her baby move in another woman.
And there could be residual memories of her own time having that particular test.
With Lily.
Lying naked except for a pair of cotton sleep shorts in the bed he’d shared with her the last time they’d seen one another, he started to text her back and, leaving a half-typed message sitting on his screen, hit Call instead.
“Why the change of plans?” he asked as soon as she picked up. He wasn’t behaving well. Heard the cranky tone in his voice. Knew he didn’t want to fight with her.
And waited.
“Because I have to work tomorrow,” she said. “A schedule change. I have a new patient that I’m following closely. The next twenty-four hours are critical and I switched with another doctor so that I could be there.”
It didn’t have to happen that way. Doctors covered for each other on a regular basis.
“Last I knew you wanted the ultrasound scheduled on your day off...” Just in case, he’d surmised.
“Yes. But, you know, maybe it’s better this way. I won’t have time to wallow in my own sauce if I’m at work. I’m at my best there, and that’s what everyone needs from me right now. To be at my best.”
It was a curious statement, the fact that she’d shared the thought even more so.
“Who’s everyone?” He turned off the bedside light and lay there facing the wall of windows looking out over the city with the darkness of the ocean broken by bobbing pieces of light beyond.
“You. The potential baby. My mom. Beth... Just everyone.”
She’d named him first. He couldn’t make too much of it.
And it mattered.
“Why do you think I need you at your best?”
She didn’t have a quick comeback. He waited through her pause.
“I don’t. Not you necessarily. Just...our situation. It’s challenging. There are n
o easy answers. We’re trying to figure out what to do and I need to give it my best. If this baby matures, it will need me to have given it my best.”
Propping pillows up behind him, he wished she was there in the room with him. That he could look in her eyes. Reach for her—not sexually at the moment—just to talk.
Because suddenly she was talking. Not just about their situation, but about herself in dealing with it. The distinction might be slight, but it seemed huge.
“I never needed you to be your best, Liv. I just needed you to let me see you.”
“You didn’t need me at all. You needed to take care of me, maybe. And you did see me.”
“In the beginning, maybe. When things got rough, even before Lily was born, you were already building up walls to shut me out. Which made me push harder until it felt like I was suffocating you. So, I backed off, gave you your space, and that didn’t work, either. It just gave you a chance to strengthen the walls.”
“You never suffocated me, Martin. But your constant need to fix things started to make me feel like I couldn’t do things for myself. I started to feel less and less capable. Like I needed you for everything. But you didn’t need me at all. It was like our relationship was all about you taking care of me.”
She’d said twice in less than five minutes that he hadn’t needed her. He didn’t compute that. Couldn’t figure out where she was even coming from with that one. But the rest, his need to fix things...he felt the sting of truth in her words.
“I’m a guy who sets a goal and then gives all my energy into achieving that goal,” he said slowly. “When I married you, I promised to have your back for the rest of my life, to do everything in my power to make you happy. That was my goal...and yet, no matter how hard I tried, how many ways I tried, I couldn’t achieve that goal.”
“My happiness was never your responsibility,” she told him. “In the first place, a person has to choose to be happy, to allow the good feeling in, to acknowledge it when it’s there, notice it, look for it. And in the second place, we got pregnant so quickly, and then to find out that she hadn’t grown as she should have done... That was completely outside of your control.”
“But having me around should have helped. It didn’t.”
Her pause was longer and the silence rang like a death knell on any future they might try to build together. Even a parental one.
She cleared her throat and he sat up. Was she crying? Oh God, the last thing he’d wanted was to make her cry.
“I, uh, had kind of an odd conversation with Sylvia tonight.” Her words weren’t at all what he’d expected; her voice was filled with questions...but no tears.
“Odd how?”
“Well, in the first place, she doesn’t dislike you.”
“I never thought she did. She just didn’t want me around you. And looking back, I don’t blame her,” he said, words he’d held for years breaking free. Less than two months ago they’d said they were never going to see each other again. There was nothing to lose by not holding back.
Instead of trying to hold on, they’d hit rock bottom, and could only go up from there.
Had to find a way to go up if their baby gestated.
Or maybe he just had to let go. “I never should have married you, Liv.” He told her what he’d known for a while. “I should have left you to grow up a bit more and find a man your own age. Or, at the very least, waited a lot longer before I asked you to marry me. Instead, I cashed in on the intensity of our feelings for each other and fast-tracked you to my time frame. I was in my thirties, needing to start a family, and I put that on you immediately, rather than letting you be a college student, giving you time to find your way in the world first. I knew the way and thought I could teach you. What I didn’t realize was that we each had to find our own way.”
He heard a sound, movement of some kind. Knew she was there. “Wow.” The one word came a good thirty seconds after he’d quit talking.
“Um, that’s...not where I was going...at all.”
He’d surprised her. Good to know he still could, he supposed. And knew that he was a sitting duck, right there in his own bed, waiting for her to put him out of his misery. To agree with him.
But maybe that’s where this had all been leading. A place where they could accept they’d made a mistake and figure out how to create a future where they could be friends. Or something. For the baby’s sake.
If there came to be one.
The ultrasound the next day...if there was a heartbeat...if measurements were in normal range...they were going to have to start planning.
To find the answers.
The baby wasn’t going to wait around for its parents to figure out what to do.
“I really don’t know what to do with all of that,” Olivia said slowly. “I can argue part of it... I was an adult, Martin. I knew my own mind. Even in that whole thing you just said, you talked as though I was a child and you were an adult. I certainly wasn’t the only twenty-year-old getting pregnant. Women a lot younger than me have babies and are great moms.
“That said, there might be some truth to you rushing me. I’ve always believed you didn’t need me. Have always felt that you didn’t. But maybe, if I’d been a little older...maybe I was too young, too caught up in my own stuff, to be a proper wife to you. The guys I was used to just put whatever was on their minds out there. But you, with your maturity, you’d already learned to take life as it came...which was one of the things that most attracted me to you to begin with.”
Interesting. More than interesting. For a second there the knot in his gut loosened.
“I also think it was just fate,” she said next, speaking softly. He wondered if she was in bed. Looking out her window as he was looking out his.
Funny how they both had bedrooms with full window views, just like their home when they’d been married.
“I was young, yes, but what happened with Lily... Age wasn’t going to make that pain any less unbearable.”
“Nope.” He had to agree. “It didn’t.”
“Sylvia was talking about all of that tonight,” Olivia said next, reminding him that she’d started out telling him her mother didn’t dislike him.
And wondered why her mother had raised the subject. Because Olivia had been having a hard moment as she faced the ultrasound, faced the possibility that there’d be no heartbeat, not enough growth, no viable pregnancy, just one that had not yet naturally aborted itself?
“She thinks she’s partially responsible for our divorce. She thinks that if she hadn’t swooped in to be a great mother to me, you and I might have turned to each other more.”
He couldn’t tell if Olivia agreed, or not.
And wasn’t sure he did. For his part, sure, he’d have liked to have had his wife to himself. But Liv had been so young, and so devastated...
“You needed her,” he admitted. “You needed a woman who understood. I wasn’t ever going to get what it felt like to carry a baby inside my body and then have to watch it die.”
He’d tried so hard to understand. And just hadn’t.
“I didn’t get why you blamed yourself,” he told her now. “I still don’t. It’s like telling someone who’s born blind that it’s their fault they can’t see.”
“A mother instinctively needs to know she can keep her child safe...” Olivia’s tone had weakened. “I failed to do that in the most elemental way. I’ve been told I’m incapable of doing it. It’s a feeling that cuts to the core. Logic holds no bearing on it.”
“And so, tomorrow...when you watch your baby move inside another woman’s body...are you going to be okay with that?”
She laughed, and gulped, too. “If there’s a baby moving in there, I don’t care if it’s inside the pope, I’m going to be okay with it,” she said. And then sniffed. “And no, of course not,” she added softly, and that time he heard te
ars in her voice. “How can I be? Knowing that I can’t gestate my own child? That someone else is going to feel it grow? And kick. Knowing that my baby is going to bond so intimately with another woman before it even meets me?”
That. That’s what he needed. Her. In all her rawness.
“And that’s how it feels to be a father,” he said, just making the connection himself, remembering how cut off he felt from the bond between Lily and Olivia during her pregnancy. “So, tomorrow, we’ll be in it together.”
Maybe it wouldn’t help. There was no way to fix her uterus, to allow her to carry her own child. He couldn’t do it. No one could. But he could be there.
Understanding.
And maybe, by just standing next to each other through what was to come, even without all the answers, they could find a way to become friends.
Chapter Seventeen
Surprisingly, the call with Martin the night before seemed to have put Olivia in a place better suited to handling the prospect of the ultrasound Thursday morning.
Christmas Eve day.
While traffic had been bustling on the streets of Marie Cove that morning, with last-minute shopping and holiday errands quickly reaching critical deadline stage, the Parent Portal was unusually quiet. Beth’s car was the only one in the patient parking lot when she pulled in.
Olivia wore black casual pants and a long-sleeved red top with a smiling snowman emblazoned on the front. She was debating whether she should wait for Martin or go in and talk to Beth when she saw his vehicle pull into the lot.
For a split second, she had a vision of a young group of boys piling out of the second and third seats, leaving snack bags and crumbs behind them, and then shook the idea away. She’d long since realized the danger of creating fantasies. No way would she and Martin ever be that family.
She waited for him, though, wishing her hair were down, a blanket of sorts, instead of in the work bun that left her so fully exposed. She wanted to thank him for their conversation the night before. To let him know that it had helped.
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