This Time For Keeps

“Just want to do one last dry run,” he said. “Your mama thought your little girl would make a perfect guinea pig, if’n you don’t mind me usin’ that expression.”

Your little girl…

Briskly Meg unfastened Charlotte from the car seat and shifted her onto her hip. She’d found the perfect frilly white dress.

“Here she is,” she cooed, and with one three-toothed smile, Charlotte innocently chased Meg’s worries away.

The three of them made their way from the gravel parking area as another car turned off the narrow highway. Meg pushed Charlotte in her new jogging stroller, navigating the winding trail as they went. Every year the town seeded the big field, making sure that with spring a colorful parade of bluebonnets and Indian paintbrush and poppies stood ready for the festival. Three years before they’d added irrigation to compensate for increasingly dry winters.

It was a photographer’s paradise. Russell had once said—

Russell had said a lot of things.

“Just over yonder,” Ray said, leading them down a small trail toward a monstrous patch of eager bluebonnets, dotted by the occasional red of a poppy. In the center, a small indentation marked the spot.

“Lighting is almost perfect,” Ray observed while Meg lifted Charlotte from the stroller. They had the field all to themselves, except for the tall man in the distance. Against the Western sky the sun cast him in silhouette, but did nothing to hide the slight limp. “I’ve gotten some of my best shots this time of day. Just put her right…there.”

Looking away from the stranger, Meg carried Charlotte through the flowers, trying not to crush any as she went. At the clearing, she smoothed Charlotte’s fancy dress and lowered her toward the ground.

Charlotte started to cry.

“Oh, baby,” Meg murmured, pulling back to look down at Charlotte’s sweet little face—now red and splotchy. “No, no, no,” she said, trying again.

But Charlotte wrapped her pudgy little arms around Meg’s neck and clung on for dear life. “Mama-mama…”

At a loss, Meg glanced back to the photographer who’d once taken similar pictures of her, when she was a child. To this day, they lined the hallway of the small ranch-style house in which she’d grown up. “This might take a while.”

With a hand to his graying beard, her mother’s friend shrugged. “Not a problem.”

“Here now,” she said to the baby. “Let Ma—” She broke off, tried again. “We can sit together,” she said, rubbing her hand along Charlotte’s back as she lowered her into the small clearing.

Honeybees buzzed up—and Charlotte’s wails turned into shrieks.

“Tell you what,” Ray said. “You take your time and I’m going to go get a picture of them poppies over there. When I come back, I’ll get the two of you.”

“No—I—” But he was already shuffling down the path. And anyway, Meg knew it was no use. She could tell the photographer she didn’t want to be in any pictures, but he would take them anyway.

“That’s my girl,” she said, holding Charlotte close to her heart and rocking with the breeze. “There’s nothing to be afraid of.”

The baby nestled closer, much as she did during the stillness of the night. Sometimes they’d sit in the rocking chair with lullabies drifting through the room until the first rays of dawn filtered through the blinds. Sometimes Meg would fall asleep holding her. Lately, she’d begun carrying Charlotte back to her bed and snuggling up with her. Sleeping with a baby still worried her a little, but she was pretty sure Char was big enough and strong enough to scoot away if she needed to.

“See, it’s all okay,” she soothed, as she’d done for the past two months. She’d been there the morning Charlotte was born. She’d made a promise before God the day Charlotte was baptized. She’d held her and loved her, bathed her, dressed her, spoiled her madly.

But she’d never imagined that one day she would hold a sleeping angel, while Father O’Sullivan read Charlotte’s mother her last rites.

Meg closed her eyes and held her niece tight. The warmth of the sun felt good, the whisper of the breeze. The softness of the baby in her arms. For so long she’d wanted to share her life with a child.

But not like this.

Gradually Charlotte quit squirming, her body relaxing into the heaviness of sleep. Meg smiled, realizing once again that best-laid plans were the stuff of Lori’s fairy tales.

Opening her eyes, she squinted against the glare of the late-afternoon sun and looked for Ray. She’d need to tell him—

At the edge of the clearing a lone man stood in the shade of a tall, gnarled post oak. The play of shadows stole detail, but still she knew. Two years could change a lot. Give, and take. Create, and devastate.

But they’d done nothing to mute the low quickening, the visceral reaction she’d first experienced one crisp fall day in New York a lifetime ago. He’d come into the lecture hall as a guest lecturer for her News Editorial class.

He’d walked out with her heart.

Now he stood not fifty feet away, the man who’d pulled into the parking lot as she and Charlotte had walked away, the man she’d seen at the edge of the clearing, watching. The low-slung jeans and wrinkled button-down were just as she remembered.

The limp was new.

CHAPTER TWO

Two and a half years before

“MEG, YOU READY?”

She looked up from the well-worn parenting magazine and grinned. Instinctively her hand slid to her tummy. “Absolutely.”

Dr. Brennan’s smile was warm. A tall, slender woman nearing sixty, she’d taken care of Meg since her first ob-gyn appointment over a decade before. “I thought Russell would be here.”

Meg refused to let the frown form. Not today. “So did I,” she admitted with a quick glance at her watch. She’d been leaving messages for half an hour. He’d yet to call her back. “He must have gotten hung up at a meeting.”

It wasn’t the first time, and, she figured, it wouldn’t be the last. Russell was like that, always losing himself in one project or another. His mother called it escape, but Meg thought that was overly harsh. Russell was an intensely intense man. He did nothing halfway. He was all in, or all out.

“Should we wait a little bit?” Dr. Brennan asked. “I can probably spot you another fifteen or twenty minutes.”

It was the right thing to do. Over the years he’d been by her side at so many appointments and procedures. Rarely did he miss. But today…

“Nah,” Meg said, standing. There was no telling how much longer Russell would be, and as it was, she’d been waiting just about her whole life for this. She could tell him the news herself. She could surprise him. She already had the pink and blue booties purchased.

After the sonogram, she’d know which pair to wrap.

“Let’s do this,” she said, reaching for her satchel.

Dr. Brennan nodded. “If you’re sure,” she said, escorting Meg toward the exam room. “Do you have any feelings, one way or the other?”

“Russell thinks girl.”

“And you?”

“Healthy,” Meg replied as a little flutter quaked through her. “I’m just thinking healthy.”

Present Day

TWO YEARS WAS A LONG TIME.