After he was gone, she made herself a cup of raspberry tea and sat down in the tiny bedroom to admire the crib. She dreamed of the day when she’d have a baby of her own sleeping on the pretty yellow sheets, when she could decorate the walls of the room with bright paper and a border of ducks and rabbits and put a rocker in the corner. The image was so clear, she felt an incredible pang of longing to make it real.
“But it’s not real,” she told herself sternly, forcing herself to leave the room and close the door firmly behind her. The purchase of that crib suddenly seemed foolish. She was months, if not years, ahead of herself.
This time it was her friend Daisy who was having the baby, her third. She already had two boys and had discovered that this one would be a girl. She and her husband were over the moon about it, even though the boys were teenagers already and this baby had been a huge surprise.
Jane told herself that the sharp stab of envy she felt was normal, the alarm going off on her biological clock, so to speak. Buying a crib, however, was a bit of an overreaction. Maybe she should call Annie, admit she’d made a ridiculous mistake and have John pick up the crib and take it back to the store. She even reached for the phone, but she couldn’t seem to make herself dial.
If only…
She brought herself up short. There was no sense looking back. Mike Marshall, the love of her life, was in her past. They had made a rational, mature decision together to end the relationship nearly a year ago when he’d been offered an incredible job in San Francisco. A clean break, they had decided. No looking back.
Mike had always dreamed of the kind of opportunities this new company would give him. He’d craved the recognition it could bring him as an engineer, the financial stability of the salary a big firm could offer.
Jane’s dreams were different, simpler—a home, a family, roots in a community where neighbors knew each other and cared about each other. It was almost the way she’d grown up, the way she wanted her own children to be raised, quietly and with a greater sense of stability in their lives than she had had with a father who’d always been running off.
Since Mike had gone, she’d told herself a thousand times that they’d made the right decision, the sensible decision. Love sometimes meant letting go. If they’d been meant to be together, they would have walked down the aisle years sooner, but Mike had always held back, needing the proof that he could support a family in a style his own background had never provided.
But Jane still cried herself to sleep thinking about him. Being sensible, she’d concluded, sucked.
Since he’d gone, she’d hidden her favorite snapshot of him deep in the bottom of her drawer, but every now and then she stumbled across it and each and every time it brought tears to her eyes. The sale of his old house, right next door, had made his move final and the permanency of it had left her shaken for months. Lately she’d told herself she was over him, that she had to be over him. But she wasn’t, not by a long shot.
Once they had talked about a future, about having babies and growing old together, but that golden opportunity in California had been too powerful for Mike to resist. She wouldn’t have let him turn it down, even if he’d wanted to.
And she hadn’t been ready or willing to leave the town and the job that suited her so perfectly. Both of them had dug in their heels, unable to see any way to compromise. And so a relationship that had once meant the world to both of them had ended.
By now he’d probably found someone new, someone more suited to a big-city lifestyle, someone whose social life revolved around more than baby showers and picnics and an occasional movie. She hoped he had. She didn’t want him to be as lonely and miserable as she was.
What if he was, though? What if he missed her as desperately as she missed him? If that were the case, though, wouldn’t he have called?
No, of course not, she told herself, not if he took their agreement as seriously as she did. Not if that famous Irish pride of his had kicked in as viciously as hers had. When it came to pure stubbornness, they were a perfect match.
She opened the door to the spare room and stared at the crib again, imagining her baby there, hers and Mike’s. A chubby, strong little boy with round cheeks and thick black hair just like Mike’s. Or maybe a rosy-cheeked little girl with glints of red in her hair just like Jane’s.
Had she closed the door on that dream too soon? Had she accepted Mike’s departure too readily, conceding defeat when she should have been fighting tooth and nail to find a way to make it work?
Finding that crib at Annie’s had forced her to face emotions she had convinced herself were dead and buried. If she still loved Mike as deeply as ever, didn’t she owe it to both of them to see him again, to see if there was anything left now that he’d had a chance to test his wings in the kind of job and city he’d always dreamed of?
Spring break was just around the corner. So was Mike’s birthday, though she’d always been more sentimental about such occasions than he had been. After she paid for the crib, her savings account was going to be low, but there was enough left for a trip to San Francisco without dipping into the rainy day money her
