29.

Noelle Wrightsville Beach, North Carolina

September 1992

This is the most despicable, most insane thing you've ever done, she told herself as she walked through the quiet, dimly lit hallway of the Blockade Runner. It was two in the morning and Wrightsville Beach had been sleeping when she pulled into the parking lot of the ma.s.sive oceanfront hotel. She wanted privacy. She wanted everyone to be sleeping. There was only one other person she wanted to be awake.

She walked into the empty foyer. A huge sign greeted her. Welcome LSAS! She had no idea what the letters stood for. The L was either legal or law. It didn't matter. She didn't care about the conference. She turned left and started walking down the hall.

Her life was very full these days, and she was grateful. She was finally doing what she'd longed to do since she was twelve years old-practicing midwifery. She lived ten minutes from Emerson and her new husband, Ted, renting the little Sunset Park house Ted had lived in before he and Emerson were married. Sunset Park was exactly the type of neighborhood Noelle loved: diverse, utterly unpretentious, with a growing sense of community. Emerson was already pregnant and very happy, and when Emerson was happy Noelle was happy.

It seemed ironic that Ted and Emerson, who'd known each other less than a year, were already married while Tara and Sam still were not-although that was about to change. Their wedding was only two weeks away. Tara would have been delighted to get married the day after she graduated from UNC, if not before, but Sam had taken things at a slower pace. He wanted everything in place before he got married, he'd said. He wanted the bar exam behind him and his law practice set up before he took on a wife and family. Now, things were as in place as they were going to get. Tara was in her first year of teaching and Sam had sailed through the bar exam and joined an already established attorney, Ian Cutler, in his practice. Sam could stall no longer. That was the way Noelle had come to view his reluctance to plan the wedding. He was having his doubts, and although he never said as much, she felt certain she was the cause. How could he marry one woman when he had feelings for another? She couldn't let him. Not without a fight. As full as her life felt, there was one thing missing and that was Sam. His wedding date now loomed on her calendar like a death.

She found his room easily. First floor, oceanfront. They could leave the sliding gla.s.s doors open and listen to the sea. She'd gotten the number from Tara, telling her she needed to talk to him about a midwifery case. She hated lying to Tara about why she wanted Sam's room number. Somehow the lie felt even worse than what she was doing now. But Tara, ever trusting, bought her excuse. It wouldn't be the first time Noelle had consulted with Sam about one of her patients. He was focusing on health law, which pleased her, and she liked to think she had something to do with his choice since she was always bending his ear with her concerns about child and maternal health. When the five of them got together, she and Sam often wound up talking shop while everyone else discussed wedding plans or the real-estate market. She felt closer to him than ever. He was the only person who knew that she was Emerson's sister, the only person she could ever talk to about how that relationship gave her both joy and pain.

She knocked on the door to his room, then waited in the silence. Nothing. She knocked again, harder.

Sam pulled the door open and she knew she'd awakened him. His dark hair was tousled, his jeans unsnapped, his chest bare. His eyes widened when he saw her, his lashes so long that they cast shadows on his cheeks from the hallway lights.

"What's wrong?" he said. "Is Tara all right?"

"Everyone's fine," she said. "I just wanted to see you."

He hesitated a moment, and she knew he was trying to make sense of what she'd said. What she was doing here at two in the morning, two weeks before his wedding.

Reaching for her wrist, he drew her into the room. She walked straight to the unmade side of his bed and sat down on the edge. She felt the light from the night table pool over her and wondered what he saw in her face.

He looked at her, hands on his hips, and for the briefest of moments, neither of them spoke.

"Ah, Noelle," he said, finally. The words sounded tired. They sounded a little bit like surrender. "What are you doing?"

"Trying to keep you from making a mistake," she said. "A mistake for both you and Tara. And for me." She swallowed. For the first time since making the decision to come here, she felt nervous.

He looked toward the curtained sliding gla.s.s doors. "I don't want to have this conversation in here." He nodded toward the bed as if it could overhear them. He switched off the lamp, then began opening the curtains. Beyond the gla.s.s, she could see the white ripple of waves as they rushed toward the sh.o.r.e. Sam snapped his jeans, then slid open one of the doors. "Let's go for a walk," he said.

She slipped off her sandals and dangled them from her fingertips as she followed him out to the patio. They climbed over the iron railing and crossed the gra.s.s to the beach where the air was dark and balmy, filled with salt and the rush and fall of the waves. A crescent moon bisected the ocean with a sliver of light. He took her hand. Yes. She'd needed that. Needed to know he wasn't angry that she'd come.

"No babies tonight?" he asked.

"None. Last night, I delivered my doula's first." It had been a peaceful birth in the small candlelit bedroom Suzanne shared with her husband, Zeke, who had been by her side every minute. The infant with the big name, Cleveland Ezekiel Johnson, had slipped into Noelle's hands with such ease for a first baby. "It went very well." Now Emerson was talking about a home delivery. Being the midwife of a relative was frowned upon, but the thought of delivering her own niece or nephew made Noelle smile. No one-except Sam-would be any the wiser.

"You'll be there for Tara and me when we're ready," Sam said, like a test. "Right?"

She focused on the way his hand felt in hers. "Sam," she said, "you can change your mind. People do it. People realize they're making mistakes that will impact so many people for the rest of their lives. You can-"

"Shh." He squeezed her hand hard. "Please, just...don't mess with my head, all right? I've thought about it inside out and backward these past couple of years, Noelle. You know that. You know I've wrestled with this and I've made a choice. Please respect it."

"You love me," she said.

He didn't deny it. "There's more to consider than love," he said.

"I don't think so."

"I love Tara, too, and we're better matched than you and I are. You know that. I want a house in the burbs. I want-"

"The white picket fence. The dog. The kids. I know you say that, but-"

"You're one of the best people I know." He interrupted her. "On the scale of incredible women, you're up there with Tara. In some ways, you even top her. But she wants the same life I want, Noelle. Admit it to me. You don't want to entertain a roomful of lawyers, do you? You don't want to do the Wilmington social scene, the things I'll need to do-my wife will need to do-for my career."

She didn't answer. It was all true. She didn't want any of that, but she believed with all her heart that, deep down, Sam didn't want it, either.

He stopped walking, turning to face her. She saw the moon-two little silver crescents-reflected in his eyes. "You're a fantasy," he said, "and Tara's my reality. With you...I always feel as though if I touch you, my hand will pa.s.s right through you. Like you're an apparition."

She lifted his hand, slid it beneath her shirt to her bare breast. "Does this feel like an apparition?" she asked. She let go of his hand but he didn't lower it. She felt his thumb graze her nipple and knew he was making a decision. She knew in her heart, though, it wasn't a decision that would erase the wedding coming up in two weeks. He was making a decision for tonight. For right now.

He leaned forward, pressing his lips against hers. She felt his erection through his jeans, through her skirt. Right now was not what she'd come here for. She wanted forever. Yet as her nipple tightened beneath the touch of his fingers and her heartbeat thrummed between her legs, she forgot about forever. She would take whatever he would give her tonight. It would have to last all their lives, through his world of picket fences and expensive haircuts and clean, pressed suits and her world of patchwork furniture and middle-of-the-night runs filled with blood and birth. If tonight was all she could have of him, she would make it worth remembering.

They lay on their backs in the sand afterward, staring at the bowl of stars above them. They'd rolled her skirt up to form a pillow beneath her head and Sam rested his own head on his jeans. She could feel spray from the waves on her bare skin as she rolled toward him, running her hand across his chest. "Are you all right?" she asked.

He didn't answer, but he sank his fingers gently into her hair. "I should feel worse than I do," he said finally.

"You feel guilty for not feeling guilty?" She smiled.

"I don't think it's sunk in yet. You know, I've never cheated on Tara. In the seven years we've been together. Never."

"Don't use that word. Cheat. Please."

"This...you understand this doesn't change anything?" His chin brushed her temple as he spoke.

"It changes something for me," she said. "It gives me a memory to hold on to."

He curled a strand of her hair around his finger. "You could have any of a hundred men who want you," he said. "Ian, for example."

She ignored the comment. She knew Sam's new law partner had a thing for her, but the attraction was one-sided. Ian was nice enough, good-looking in a clean-cut sort of way and smart as a whip. She'd considered sleeping with him, but thought that might be a mistake. He was the type who'd want more, and the truth was, if she was going to be with a man for anything long term, he would need to be a Sam clone, and Ian wasn't.

"I don't want you to worry about this," she said. "About tonight. I'm not going to ask anything of you like this, ever again. If you feel sure you're doing the right thing by marrying Tara, I'll support that one hundred percent because I love you both." She heard the crack in her voice, completely unexpected. Sam rubbed her shoulder. "I'll go out with Ian a few times and give him a chance, okay?"

"Good," he said. "You'll make him a happy man."

She sat up with a sigh and reached for her clothes. "I should go," she said, pulling her blouse over her head. She stood and dusted the sand from her thighs as Sam began to dress. It was good she had done this, she thought. Yes, she'd betrayed one of her closest friends and she knew that would haunt her, but she'd needed to do it to let Sam go. Otherwise, she'd be mooning over him for years. Decades. And that could only have been more harmful to her friendship with Tara in the long run. Now she was finished, she told herself as she slipped into her skirt. This chapter of longing was closed.

She pointed toward the parking lot behind the Blockade Runner. "My car's on this end of the lot," she said.

He put his arm around her as they walked across the sand. His silence worried her, but once they reached her car he hugged her, holding her for a long time, and she pressed her hands flat against his bare back. "No regrets, Sam," she said. "Please."

He pulled away from her slowly, running his palm down the length of her arm before opening her car door for her. "Be well," he said.

"You, too." She sat down behind the wheel and, without looking back at him, drove away.

Her tears surprised her with how quickly they came. Her body convulsed with them as she drove and she could barely see the road in front of her. The night was inky black as she crossed the bridge to the mainland, and when she stopped at a red light she could see no other cars on the road at all. She pressed her hands to her face, wishing she could escape from her body.

Suddenly, the squeal of brakes filled her head and she opened her eyes to see headlights swerving toward her. Letting out a scream, she turned her wheel sharply to the left and stepped on the gas. The oncoming car caught her right b.u.mper, spinning her car around and tossing her, unbelted, against the dashboard. She pressed hard on the brake and felt as though every muscle in her back snapped in two as her car jerked to a stop.

A man jumped out of the other car and began running toward her, shouting, waving his arms wildly in the air. She locked her car doors. Was he crazy? Furious? It took her a moment to understand what he was saying.

"You don't have your lights on, a.s.shole!" he shouted. "Where the f.u.c.k are your lights?"

No lights? G.o.d! What was wrong with her? Her hands shook as she flicked the k.n.o.b for her headlights. She saw the man pull a phone from his pocket. The police. Jumbled thoughts raced through her mind, one of them rising quickly to the top: she didn't want to have to explain to anyone what she was doing in Wrightsville Beach in the middle of the night.

She stepped on the gas pedal and took off across the intersection, speeding away from the man and his shouting, hoping she was disappearing into the darkness too quickly for him to be able to read her license plate number. When she was a few blocks away, she pulled into a deserted parking lot, turned off her car and sat very still, waiting for her heart to settle down. But as the beat slowed and steadied, the muscles in her back contracted into a knot that was tight and sharp and savage, and she knew that her betrayal of Tara was not all that would haunt her about this night.

30.

Tara Wilmington, North Carolina

2010.

I hadn't been in Sam's office since before he died. Ian had brought two boxes of personal items to me a few weeks after his death and I wished he hadn't bothered. The spare pair of sungla.s.ses, a couple of business awards, framed photographs of Grace and me and other odds and ends-I would have just as soon not seen them. Now Emerson and I sat on the sofa in front of the windows in Sam's old office waiting for Ian. Sam's desk still had a monitor and keyboard on it, but nothing else. The only other things in the room besides the furniture were the floor-to-ceiling bookcases filled with law books and three gleaming wooden antique file cabinets. They were the file cabinets Ian had slowly been making his way through as he tried to determine which of Sam's old cases needed his attention.

"You want something cold to drink?" he asked as he walked into the office. "Water? Soda?" He had a legal-size manila folder in his hands. It was neither thick nor thin. The edges were worn as though it had been beaten up a little over time.

"We're good," I said. I knew we both just wanted him to get to the point.

Ian sat down in one of the leather chairs in front of Sam's desk. "Well." He looked at me-apologetically, I thought. "Noelle continues to surprise us."

"Ian," Emerson said impatiently. "What did you find?"

He held up the folder. "This was with Sam's old cases. The name on the file is Sharon Byerton. It's a made-up name, I'm sure."

"Why a made-up name?" I asked.

"I've done it myself," Ian said. "If I'm working with a client whose ident.i.ty I want to protect from anyone who might stumble across the file, I'll give it a false name. When I opened the folder, though..." He shook his head. He wore an expression of disbelief, as if he still couldn't fathom what he'd found inside. He opened the file now and I could see a stack of the heavy, creamy sort of paper Sam used for legal doc.u.ments. "Remember Noelle's so-called 'rural work'?" he asked.

We nodded.

"She wasn't practicing midwifery then," he said, "except maybe on herself."

"What are you talking about?" Emerson asked.

"These are contracts," he said, holding the papers in the air. "She was a gestational surrogate."

"A...?" The words wouldn't come out of my mouth.

"Five times. When she went away to do her rural work, she was actually in Asheville or Raleigh or Charlotte, finishing the last few months of a pregnancy and turning over a baby to that child's biological parents."

I couldn't speak and Emerson seemed to have lost her voice, as well. It was too much to take in. Way too much.

"How can this be?" Emerson looked at me. "How can this possibly be? Why would she do this?"

"Oh...my...G.o.d," I said slowly. "Are you sure?"

Ian leaned forward to hand us each a contract. I looked down at the pages of legalese. There were the names of strangers in the blanks marked genetic father and genetic mother. Noelle's name in the blank for embryo carrier. I looked up at Ian. "Who are these people?"

He shook his head. "I have no information other than what's in those contracts. The contracts are well drafted, but they're not your typical surrogacy contract, not that I've seen a lot of them. Usually surrogates are married and have children and the husband would sign the contract also. Of course, that's not the case here. She went into each contract prior to the in vitro fertilization, which I'm glad to see. She covered herself carefully. Or, I guess, Sam did. In each case, the parents paid all her expenses, of course, plus fifteen thousand dollars, which is low for this sort of thing, but I could see Noelle thinking that was just fine. She didn't have many personal expenses."

"We didn't charge her much rent." Emerson's voice was husky.

"There's the usual restrictions on the surrogate not interfering with the raising of the child or ever trying to a.s.sert parental rights. And there's-"

"When did she start doing this?" Emerson asked.

"The first contract was signed in April 1998." He cleared his throat and looked down at the contracts in his lap, and when he spoke again, his voice was thick. "Usually there's something in a surrogacy contract about a psychiatric evaluation of the surrogate, but there's no provision for that here, and I..." His voice trailed off and he lowered his head, his hand rubbing his chin, his eyes glistening behind his gla.s.ses. I felt so sad for him. I stood and crossed the room to lean over to hug him.

"She wasn't right, Ian," I said. "Something was off with her and none of us saw it."

"I want to talk to some of these parents," Emerson said. "At least the last couple. Can I do that?"

Ian lifted his head again and squeezed my arm in a little thank-you gesture as he regained his composure. "I'll contact them and see if they're willing," he said. I stood next to his chair, my hand still on his shoulder. My own eyes had misted over, not for Noelle but for him, and I realized that I cared about him more than I'd thought.

"We missed her being pregnant," Emerson said. "Five times!"