“Would it work?”
The doctor paused. “There’s always a chance.”
It was the pause that did it for Betsy.
For Ty, it was the money.
The cows gave them a nice life, a fine life, but they wouldn’t pay for something like IVF. The financial advisor at the clinic went over payment plans with them, ways they could finance the procedure and the drugs, not to mention the various tests, scans, and other related steps that went along with the deal. All told, they would be out of pocket way more than they could imagine spending. They had insurance, but it laughed in the face of voluntary fertility treatment.
Yes, it was an investment in their future children—as the advisor had repeated—but what kind of future would they have if they mortgaged their house, barn, and cows to give them life? What would they have left to raise those children with, other than their wits and love?
Ty had shaken his head, his mind made up. Betsy knew they’d talk about it that night in bed, the lights off, legs together. He’d hear her out, let her cry, maybe shed a tear of his own at the thought of saying good-bye to such a longing. But facts were facts. That kind of treatment was out of the question. Time to move on.
That’s when the doctor had mentioned natural pregnancy. “You could also try praying,” he’d said, a helpful afterthought.
That was five months ago, in early January, a particularly raw way to start the new year. The doctor’s words echoed in her brain at all hours—“anything is possible”—but she just didn’t see any way through that vast, gaping hole between what she wanted and their actual reality: unexplained infertility. Plain old infertility she could have dealt with—diagnose the problem, fix it. It was the unexplained part that was so hard to swallow. Nothing was actually wrong with them? All his parts worked and so did hers, but they weren’t working together? How was that possible?
Weeks of going round and round like this in her head made her feel like a children’s carousel she couldn’t stop, so on a dreary day in March with spring just around the corner, she stuck her leg out and stopped the spinning. She wrapped her grandmother’s yellow crocheted baby booties in tissue paper and hid them in her closet. Threw away the marked-up calendar from the previous year. Shoved her book of fanciful flowers to the back of the dresser drawer in the room that was to have been the nursery. Moving on was the only choice she had, so she did.
She always thought she’d be done having kids by the time she was thirty. She thought by now she’d be happily absorbed in the living and raising part. And here she was, approaching her thirtieth birthday with two little girls sleeping in her empty room—they just weren’t hers.
sixteen
Jenna
Jenna stood in the middle of a rickety bridge that stretched over a bayou ringed with needlerush, cattails, and huge, knobby cypress knees poking out of the water. A patch of lily pads covered one side of the water, and on one, a frog sat in the bright sunshine. With elbows perched on the railing, her eye fixed to the viewfinder, she tried to get a shot of him before he jumped away, but the harsh light washed everything out.
She’d been at Halcyon for seven days. Casey and Gregory had both explained that the solitude and quiet—and the lack of real structure—were meant to encourage deep focus and hard work. They were right. The lack of structure—not to mention the absence of the photography mentor—meant Jenna could go days without seeing anyone if she wanted. She ate meals in the dining hall, of course, but she’d managed to miss the nightly workshops with no repercussions.
However, the solitude also meant no one knew she’d yet to produce anything of worth. She was surrounded by beauty she’d never seen before—murky swamps, bright-yellow croaking frogs, palm trees with lime-green fruit, towering pines, and scrubby oaks covered in Spanish moss—yet every time she tried to capture that beauty, it came out flat. Like she was trying too hard.
It was nice to have no one checking up on her, tapping her on the shoulder and asking to see her work, but somewhere around the middle of the week, she’d started to panic. For once, she’d had an incredible opportunity dropped in her lap and now it was sliding through her fingers. No way did she want to go home with nothing to show for her time here. She hadn’t left her kids for that.
Behind her, something moved in the trees on the other side of the bridge. She peered into the shadows, but the glare made the shade appear deeper. It was all tree trunks and leaves until she noticed one trunk was moving toward her. Not a trunk. A man.
“Sorry. Didn’t mean to startle you,” he called. It was Gregory, this time without the leather jacket, which would have been ridiculous in this heat, but still in the beat-up jeans. Camera around his neck, tripod under his arm.
“I’m just glad you’re not an alligator.”
“An alligator?”
“Yeah.” Jenna shaded her eyes as Gregory approached. “Don’t they have those in Florida?”
“True, but you’re more likely to see a fox or an armadillo. I’ve seen a couple of gators around here, but they don’t seem to be too interested in humans.”
“Good to know.”
“How’s it going?” Was that a smirk on his face? Yes. It was small but it was there.
“Awesome.” She held up her camera. “I think these are going to be great.”
He raised an eyebrow. “Good, that’s good. Think you’ll be ready for the workshop tonight?”
Jenna exhaled, blowing air out in a rush. Now he was doing his job? “I don’t know. I’m not much for public displays of embarrassment.”
“What’s so embarrassing? We’re all here to learn, right? To connect to our passion?”
She tried to hold it back but she couldn’t. Her eyes rolled almost involuntarily.
Instead of the
