The Midwife's Confession

“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 bumper, 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, asshole!” he shouted. “Where the fuck are your lights?”

No lights? God! What was wrong with her? Her hands shook as she flicked the knob 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 sunglasses, 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 identity 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 documents. “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