The Child I Never Had by Kate Hewitt

Author:Kate Hewitt [Hewitt, Kate]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

THEN

SUZANNE

October 2009

12 years ago

* * *

Suzanne flies around the apartment, straightening a coaster here, twitching a throw pillow there. Every time Mia comes to visit, she goes into full spring clean mode, making sure the apartment looks like a movie set, immaculate yet cozy. Today she feels the need even more, because for the first time Mia is bringing someone with her. Tom. Tom Sullivan.

The name rolls around like a marble in her head. She has heard it before, a few times. A little over a year ago, Mia told her about him, trying his name out as if she wasn’t quite sure of it, looking to Suzanne almost as if for approval.

“I’m seeing someone,” she’d offered shyly. “A guy I met at one of NYU’s alumnae events, actually, although we didn’t really know each other in college. Tom. He’s really nice.”

“That sounds lovely,” Suzanne had said, and meant it, because surely Mia deserved some happiness, some stability, after that other guy—whoever he was—had left her high and dry, pregnant and alone? Suzanne has never learned the details of Daisy’s conception; Mia hasn’t offered and she hasn’t felt she could ask, had presumed it wasn’t a secure relationship, maybe not even a relationship at all.

“It is,” Mia had said, with a funny, incredulous little laugh. “It is.” This time she almost sounded as if she were trying to convince herself.

Suzanne hadn’t heard anything more, and a few months later she’d dared to ask if things were going well with Tom—saying his name with peculiar, self-conscious emphasis—and again Mia had given that funny little laugh and said that yes, they were.

That had been the sum total of their conversations about him, until a phone call three days ago. Mia and Tom were engaged, and she wanted him to meet Daisy.

“Mia is getting married,” Suzanne had told Mark that evening, when Daisy was asleep. “To Tom.”

“Oh?” He’d looked guarded, as he often did when it came to Mia, although he had always acted as if he’d approved all along of the open adoption that had been foisted upon them right after Daisy had been born. Suzanne was the one who had scrambled to do the research, who had read the books, who had made herself believe it could work. Now she realizes she feels a tremulous flicker of relief, that Mia is getting married. That she will have a life of her own that does not revolve around her visits with Daisy. Maybe she will even have other children, when the time comes, her own family and not just Suzanne’s.

“She wants us to meet him,” she continued. “Daisy to meet him, I mean. She’s coming on Saturday.”

And now it is Saturday, and as has become the habit with Mia’s visits, Suzanne feels a knot of anxiety in her stomach, a sense of needing to steel herself for what is ahead. Last night she’d told Daisy about Mia’s visit, and that she was bringing a friend. She’d left it as long as she

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