“You just don’t seem like yourself,” Mrs. Fields said, folding and unfolding a cloth napkin again and again. “I’m worried about you. I thought, with the scholarship to UNC, you’d turn a corner and put everything behind you. But it’s still weighing on your mind, isn’t it?”
Tears inadvertently filled Emily’s eyes. Of course everything was still weighing on her—nothing had changed. Even worse, the woman who’d wanted her baby had found her. If A didn’t tell everyone about her pregnancy, Gayle probably would. And then what would happen? Would Emily still have a home to live in? Would her parents ever speak to her again?
She put her face in her hands and murmured that everything was so hard. Mrs. Fields patted her shoulder. “It’s okay, honey.” Which made Emily feel even worse—Emily didn’t deserve her mom’s sympathy.
“I have an idea.” Mrs. Fields picked up the cordless phone from its cradle. “Why don’t you talk to Father Fleming at the church?”
Emily made a face, thinking about Father Fleming. She’d known him forever. He’d listened to her first confession when she was seven years old, telling her not to sweat calling Seth Cardiff a walrus in the schoolyard. But admitting to a priest she’d had premarital sex? It seemed so wrong.
The thing was, Mrs. Fields wouldn’t take no for an answer—in fact, she’d already set up a meeting with Father Fleming the following day without asking Emily first. Emily relented, if only to reassure her parents that it was okay for them to go to Texas as planned. They’d left for the airport that morning, although Mrs. Fields had left a miles-long list of emergency contacts on the kitchen table and arranged for several neighbors to check in on Emily during the time they would be gone.
But now here she was, shuffling toward Father Fleming’s office. Before she knew it, she was hanging her coat on a hook shaped like a hand making a thumbs-up sign on the back of the door and looking around the room. The décor took her aback. A ceramic head of Curly from The Three Stooges leered from the windowsill. The sanctimonious preacher from The Simpsons gave her a puckered-lipped pout from next to a gooseneck lamp. There were a lot of religious texts on the bookshelves, but Agatha Christie mysteries and Tom Clancy thrillers as well. On the desk were two tiny handmade Guatemalan worry dolls.
Father Fleming noticed her looking at them. “You’re supposed to put them under your pillow to help you sleep.”
“I know. I have some, too.” Emily couldn’t hide the surprise in her voice. She didn’t think priests were superstitious. “Do they work for you?”
“Not really. What about you?”
Emily shook her head. She’d bought six worry dolls at a head shop in Hollis shortly after what happened in Jamaica, hoping that placing them under her pillow would calm her down at night. But the same thoughts still zoomed through her mind.
Father Fleming sat down in the leather chair behind his desk and folded his hands. “So. What can I do for you, Emily?”
Emily stared at her chipped green nail polish. “I’m okay, really. My mom was just worried about my stress levels. It’s not a big deal.”
Father Fleming nodded sympathetically. “Well, if you want to talk, I’m here to listen. And whatever you say goes no further than this room.”
One of Emily’s eyebrows shot up. “You won’t tell my mom about . . . anything?”
“Of course not.”
Emily ran her tongue over her teeth, her secret suddenly feeling like a festering sore inside of her. “I had a baby,” she blurted. “This summer. No one in my family knew about it except for my sister.” Just saying it out loud in such a holy place made her feel like the devil.
When she snuck a peek at Father Fleming, though, he still had the same unflappable expression on his face. “Your parents had no idea?”
Emily nodded. “I hid in the city for the summer so they wouldn’t find out.”
Father Fleming fingered his collar. “What happened to the baby?”
“I gave her up for adoption.”
“Did you meet the family?”
“Yes. They were very nice. It all went very smoothly.”
Emily stared at the cross on the wall behind Father Fleming’s desk, nervously hoping it wouldn’t shoot off of its hook and impale her for lying. Her baby was with the Bakers, but things had gone the opposite of smoothly.
After Gayle had met with Emily and Aria in the café, Emily couldn’t get Gayle’s offer out of her mind. The Bakers seemed special, but what Gayle brought to the table was special, too. Aria had scolded Emily for being so preoccupied with Gayle’s money, but she didn’t want this baby to grow up the way she had, listening to her mom agonize about money every Christmas, missing out on a Washington, D.C., field trip because her dad was out of a job, being forced into keeping with a sport she wasn’t interested in anymore because it was her only ticket to college. Emily wanted to say that money didn’t matter to her, but since she’d always had to think about money, it definitely did.
Two days later, after her shift at the restaurant, Emily called Gayle and said she wanted to talk more. They arranged to meet at a coffee shop near Temple that very night. A little before 8 PM, Emily cut through a small Philadelphia park, and a hand had shot out from the darkness and cupped her belly. “Heather,” a voice said, and Emily screamed. A figure stepped into the light, and Emily couldn’t be more surprised to see Gayle’s smiling face. “W-what are you doing here?” she gasped. Gayle shrugged. “It was such a nice night I thought we could talk outside. But someone’s jumpy,” she said with a laugh.
Emily should have turned around and left, but instead she told herself that maybe she was being jumpy. Maybe Gayle was just playful. So she accepted Gayle’s carryout cup of decaf coffee and stayed. “Why do you want my baby?” she asked. “Why can’t you go through an adoption agency?”
Gayle patted the seat next to her, and Emily plopped down on the bench. “The wait with an adoption agency is too long,” she said. “And we suspect that potential mothers wouldn’t choose me and my husband because of what happened to our daughter.”
Emily raised an eyebrow. “What did happen to her?”
A faraway, uncomfortable look came over Gayle’s face. Her left hand kneaded her thigh. “She had problems,” she said quietly. “She was in an accident when she was younger and never quite recovered.”
“An . . . accident?”
Suddenly, Gayle put her head in her hands. “My husband and I are dying to be parents again,” she said with urgency. “Please let us have the baby. We can give you fifty thousand dollars cash for your trouble.”
Emily felt a palpable jolt of surprise. “Fifty thousand dollars?” she repeated. That could pay for all four years of college. She wouldn’t have to swim on scholarship every year. She could take a gap year and travel the world. Or she could donate it all to charity, to other babies who wouldn’t have an opportunity like this one.
“Maybe we can work something out,” Emily said quietly.
Gayle’s face twitched. She let out a whoop of joy and wrapped her arms around Emily tight. “You won’t regret this,” she said.
Then she jumped up, rattled off information on how they would meet again in a few days, and was gone. The darkness swallowed Gayle up entirely. Only her laugh lingered, a haunting cackle that echoed through the woods. Emily sat on the bench for a few more minutes, watching the long, bright line of traffic on the 76 expressway in the distance. She wasn’t left with a feeling of comfort, as she’d hoped. Instead, she just felt . . . weird. What had she just done?