The Friendship Pact

by Tara Taylor Quinn

  Bailey’s heart felt as though it had burst open. “Did you read mine?”

  Kora shook her head.

  “I said the same exact thing.”

  And knowing that she might lose everything, Bailey stilled Kora’s fingers, holding her hand. “I have something to tell you.” She took a deep breath. “Before I do, I want you to know that I love you with all my heart and soul, Kora. And I want you to believe, even if you never believe anything else again, that I would never, ever knowingly or purposely hurt you.”

  “Okay.” She didn’t sound convinced. Bailey couldn’t blame her.

  “That day you saw Danny and me together—”

  Kora pulled her hand away. “Jesus, Bailey, not now!”

  Taking that smaller hand back, Bailey held on tighter. “Hear me out.” Maybe something in her tone of voice got through to Kora. Maybe she was too tired to fight Bailey. For whatever reason, she looked over at her and waited.

  “That day...Danny and I weren’t...we’d never... I’m not the least turned-on by your husband. And I’m completely confident when I tell you that he’s never once looked at me in any way that’s even remotely sexual.”

  Kora raised her brows..

  “I know it looked like it that day. And in a lot of ways, letting you think that was easier than telling you the truth.”

  “What truth?”

  She couldn’t do it. Couldn’t draw in enough breath. “You always said if you ever had anything I needed, I was supposed to ask.”

  “You never asked for anything I didn’t give you.”

  Bailey, with tears in her eyes now—although she’d sworn she wasn’t going to make this harder on either of them than it had to be—said, “No, I didn’t ask, but Danny offered.”

  She was truly frowning now. “I don’t understand.”

  “Mattie.”

  “What? He needed a kidney?”

  Dear, sweet, naive Koralynn. Bailey had never loved her friend more.

  “Danny donated sperm so I could have the child I wanted.” When the words finally came, they gushed out. “You and he were having problems, becoming distant, and he felt part of it was because he and I just didn’t connect. He figured if he gave me what I needed most, we’d forge some kind of bond that would bring him into our twosome. He admitted that he’d struggled for years with being on the outside, looking in.”

  “Danny said that?”

  “Yeah. And I told him to forget it. That I couldn’t ever take a donation from him. That it wouldn’t be right. But I couldn’t find anyone else. And you were pregnant by then, and Danny said you’d always wanted us to raise our kids together. He fit my profile and tested negative for CF. He said you were the only woman he ever wanted to mother his child, that giving me sperm would be no different from donating any other body part to me...”

  “He gave you a kidney.”

  Why it surprised her so much that Koralynn got it, Bailey didn’t know, but she was shocked into silence, while Koralynn sat there thinking God knew what.

  “Mattie is Danny’s son?”

  Bailey couldn’t come right out and confirm it. The secret was too deeply buried. But she couldn’t deny it, either.

  “It just wasn’t as clean and easy as I’d thought it would be,” she whispered. “Danny was so certain you’d be glad he’d done it once you saw that artificial insemination was right for me. He thought you’d be thrilled we’d kept it in the family, that you and I would be biologically related through our kids. We were only going to keep our secret for a little while. And then you lost the baby. And Danny was hit during the game and everything turned into one huge mess.”

  “Mattie is Danny’s son? Danny has a biological child?”

  “I know, it sounds horrible, me being Mattie’s mother and all, but it wasn’t supposed to be like that. Mattie is mine. Only mine. You were having Danny’s child. But then, after William died and Danny found out he couldn’t have any more children, he got this wild idea that I’d give him Mattie, and that you’d raise him and Danny would pay for me to be inseminated by someone else. I said no without even thinking about what I was saying. He’d come on so strong and when I wouldn’t listen, he was desolate in a way I’d never seen before. He leaned toward me and I tried to comfort him. Then you walked in and—”

  “That’s what he was doing at your house? Asking you to give away your son?”

  “Demanding, not asking. But, yes.” She deserved Kora’s anger. Because she’d done a very selfish thing. She’d been unfaithful to Koralynn, to their friendship, by accepting her husband’s sperm without her blessing.

  “You betrayed me.”

  The mind reading didn’t surprise her. But it could have happened at a better moment.

  She nodded. “But you and Danny never had an affair.”

  “God, no! I wouldn’t do that to you. He wouldn’t either. That man is totally besotted with you.”

  “Danny has a biological child.”

  “Yeah.” It was out now. Fact.

  And the relief Bailey felt was...nice. Just not nice enough to counteract the guilt. Or the loss, as she sat there with her soul mate and knew she’d caused the split between them.

  “I’m glad for him.” Kora was smiling, although her expression was tinged with sadness. “Thank-you for telling me. You might just have saved my husband’s life.”

  “I hated not telling you, Kor. I don’t want secrets between us ever again. Even if you hate me, let’s just have it right out in the open.”

  “I could never hate you.”

  “But you’re angry.”

  “I don’t know what I am,” she said, sounding as shell-shocked as she looked. She placed the purple velvet bag on the coffee table. “Jealous, for sure. And hurt. But it kind of feels...not bad, too. I meant it when I said I’d give you a kidney. And, maybe, if you two had come to me, I’d have been mature enough to see that Danny was a good choice as your donor.”

  “You really think so?”

  “I don’t know. I just know that it’s brought us to now—and this. The one thing I wanted for Danny, because it’s the one thing he wanted, was to have a child of his own. And if it had to be any woman but me, I’m glad it’s you.”

  “I’ll give you guys joint custody.”

  “Let’s just wait and see what happens,” Kora said. “If Danny never regains his memory he might not ever know...” Kora’s expression changed.

  “What?”

  “He’s not the father of the baby I’m carrying.”

  “If he never regains his memory and the biological father isn’t going to have any rights, does Danny ever need to know?”

  “Would you want to carry that secret, to keep it, for the rest of your life?”

  Not after the past two years. “No.”

  “So...I have something to tell you now,” Kora said.

  “What’s that?” she asked, actually starting to hope that Kora might’ve been right all along—all those times she’d said everything would be okay.

  “Jake is the father of my baby.”

  Chapter Thirty-Four

  I was living on a precipice. At any moment, without warning, I could plunge to my death. The time for my three month checkup came, and Danny insisted on going with me to the doctor. I was having an ultrasound, and he wanted to be there. We were going to find out the sex of our child this time around.

  I couldn’t feel the child growing inside of me, but I was gaining weight, and was getting pudgy where my flat stomach used to be. If the child had been Danny’s I would’ve been elated.

  But the baby wasn’t Danny’s. And I didn’t believe in dreams come true anymore. It wouldn’t be long before Jake found out I was carrying his child.

  I hadn’t heard from Bailey since the day I�
�d told her I’d slept with the only man she’d ever loved.

  That had been almost two weeks before. She’d taken me home, dropped me off and driven away without saying a word. I didn’t blame her. I couldn’t believe what I’d done, so how could I expect her to? Not only had Jake been Bailey’s lover, but he’d also been married at the time I’d had sex with him.

  Still, I couldn’t help feeling a glow as I walked beside my husband out of the doctor’s office that day in early April. A girl. I was having a girl.

  Danny swung my hand, walking with barely any limp at all. “We need to start thinking of names,” he said. “And we’re calling your folks as soon as we get in the car. I can just hear them now. They’ll be on the next plane to Pittsburgh.”

  He rambled. And I stumbled. This wasn’t some happily ever after that I could blithely pretend to live for the rest of my life.

  I just didn’t know what else I could do. Dr. Gordon said Danny had to remember on his own. So did I live the next five or six or ten years allowing myself to hope that we could be happy, knowing every single minute of every single day that anything at all could trigger Danny’s memory and he’d realize that the little girl I carried wasn’t his?

  He could very well reject us both.

  My daughter would be heartbroken. As my thoughts raced, I understood that not only was I lying to Danny, I’d be lying to her, too.

  I played along when Danny called my folks. I pretended the baby was his, that we’d gone back in time and William Daniel was growing inside me. I made it through calls to his folks, too. Because he’d insisted, we’d never told anyone he was sterile.

  And I made it through dinner and Danny’s pampering as he drew a hot bath for me and told me to soak as long as I wanted.

  I soaked long enough to cry my eyes out. And then I crawled between the covers, hugged my husband good night, turned over and longed for the days when I’d believed that everything would be all right.

  * * *

  Kora and Jake? Try as she might over the next couple of weeks, Bailey just couldn’t grasp the idea of her best friend sleeping with the love of her life.

  If anyone else had told her that Kora had slept with Jake, she would’ve laughed out loud. And yet, as the days passed and she found it increasingly hard to ignore Jake’s calls and emails, she found it harder still to pretend that she was wiping Koralynn out of her life.

  Every morning when she woke up, she thought of her friend, wondering how Kora was doing, if she was eating well. Worrying that Kora would lose this child, too. It would kill her. Every night, when she made her last check on Mattie and crawled into bed, she wondered if Kora was getting enough rest.

  And always, she worried that tomorrow would be the day that Danny remembered their past and Kora’s life came crashing down.

  Here she lay, safe and secure with her precious son only yards away from her, while Kora writhed in mental and emotional anguish.

  She wanted to believe Kora’s pain was of her own making. But she didn’t.

  She wanted to hate her for sleeping with Jake. But she couldn’t do that either.

  The fact was, she understood. Jake and Kora had both been hurting more than they could bear. Spending all that time together, grieving for a man they both loved so much. Fearing they were going to lose him.They’d been lonely. Kora without a husband, Jake losing his best friend and his wife.

  Kora had always been the one who got lucky. She’d been the one who’d given Bailey hope. And if Koralynn fell, did that mean hope was dead, too?

  Was that was this was about?

  Her own dead hopes?

  Out of bed and on her feet, Bailey paced a good part of that cool April night. She’d said she’d give Koralynn a kidney, but the promise had been easy to make because she’d never really expected she’d have to do it. Because Kora had everything she needed.

  But Kora...she’d made that promise, too. And Bailey knew that Koralynn had made her promise from the very depths of her soul. She’d been willing to have a vital body part removed to give it to Bailey. If Bailey needed it.

  She’d actually understood when Bailey had told her about Danny’s being her donor. She’d known that his sperm was her “kidney.”

  And now Kora, in turn, needed a kidney.

  Question was, what was Bailey willing to give up?

  * * *

  Saturday mornings were becoming my favorite time of the week. Danny went to therapy and I had the house to myself. I felt awful about feeling that way. Particularly when I considered all the horrible months I’d spent in that house all alone, fearful I’d be that way forever. And yet, those Saturday mornings had become the only real time in my life. These were the hours I spent alone with the baby inside me. When I could just love her for who she was, not pretend she was someone else. Or that I was.

  I wasn’t preparing a nursery for her, but I knew she understood. There’d be plenty of time after she was born to paint walls and put up trim. For now, my focus was on making sure she was healthy.

  To that end, I was in the middle of my prenatal exercises, admittedly at a rather slow pace, when I heard a car in the driveway an hour after Danny had left. Fearful, as always these days, that something had happened to him, that some memory had returned, or he’d had a relapse of some kind, I hurried to the door. I opened it to find Jake and Bailey walking toward me.

  He was staring at me with an odd expression on his face. She was daring me to look away from her.

  I didn’t. “What’s up?”

  “You,” Bailey said, brushing by me on her way to the kitchen where she proceeded to make a fresh pot of coffee.

  “What do you mean, me?” I followed her, vaguely aware of Jake behind me, still looking kind of sick.

  “You’ve always been the true friend, Kor,” Bailey said, reaching for cups and lining them on the counter. “You’ve been there for every single one of us anytime we needed anything. You shared your family with us. Your wealth—”

  “Yeah, that’s really hard when all you have to do is ask Mom and Dad,” I told her sarcastically. I had no illusions about myself. I was a spoiled little girl who’d screwed up her life and now wanted someone to make it right.

  “No, Kor, you gave us your heart,” Bailey said, tears in her eyes. Even in front of Jake.

  I glanced over to see his reaction. He was still studying me in that odd way, like I’d sprouted horns or something.

  “You whole heart,” she said. “Never asking for anything in return.”

  Because I’d had it all handed to me.

  “So now we’re here to fix that,” Bailey told me. “You’re in a bit of a dilemma, but you aren’t alone, Kora. We’re all in this together....”

  That’s when it dawned on me. Why Jake was staring at me like that....

  “You told him.”

  “Yes. Like you said, it had to be done, and I knew that it was going to be really hard for you, and...this is a good place for me to start handing you kidneys.”

  She was being weird as hell. But right, too. I’d been dreading the conversation with Jake, more so because of the intimacy it would create between us than anything else. The way it would bind us....

  “I told him about Mattie, too.”

  “You’re not going to face this alone, Kora,” he said now. “You didn’t get here alone. We all contributed.”

  “Starting with my accepting Danny’s sperm,” Bailey added. “If I hadn’t done that, he would never have been at my house that day, and you would never have seen us together and the accident would never have happened.”

  “But then, I’d never have had a biological child of my own.”

  All three of us spun around as a very pale-looking Danny came into the room. We’d been so engrossed in our own little drama, we hadn’t heard him.

&nbs
p; “What’s wrong?” I rushed to his side. “Why aren’t you at therapy?”

  And what had he just said? Something about his biological child? How much had he heard? “I was watching a TV show while I was on the treadmill,” he said slowly, his head hanging. “A couple was fighting and the woman left. She got in a car.” He raised his head and glanced from one to the other of us. “I remembered. Everything,” he said.

  He knew my baby wasn’t his.

  But that Mattie was.

  He knew, and he was still standing.

  “The only question I have now is whose baby are you carrying?” He had tears in his eyes as he gave me a look I’d never, ever wanted to see on his face. A look of betrayal.

  I’d hurt him. Far more than any pain he’d ever caused me.

  Jake stepped forward. And Bailey did, too. “It’s yours,” Jake said. “But I’m the one who contributed the Y component.”

  “You?” Danny’s eyes burned as he looked at Jake. “You slept with my wife?”

  “No, man, I stood in for you one night when she thought you were going to die and couldn’t face the idea of life without you.”

  “You slept with Jake?” He turned to me.

  I opened my mouth, but nothing came out. “It was five minutes, Danny,” Jake said. “She cried out for you, calling you by name, and it ended.”

  “You weren’t lovers?”

  “Hell, no!” Bailey stood up to him, toe-to-toe. “And neither were you and I, brother, so you’d better stop right there. Think about the choices we made—behind Kora’s back. We chose not to include her in our decision. She never made that choice where you were concerned. She stayed by your side every minute of every day, pulling you back when you opted to remove yourself from the situation we’d created.”

  It was a bit much. Blaming Danny for his coma. But I heard the truth in her words, too. I heard what she wasn’t saying. What Jake had said, on her behalf, so many weeks before.

  “We all have to forgive ourselves for being human,” I said softly. “The question is, where do we go from here?”