“What if they think I killed her?” Rose cried. “That I pushed her! It will all come out who she is—they’ll say I did it out of revenge. Even if they don’t blame me, there will be such a scandal. My career . . .” She turned to me imploringly. “You are our only hope, Beth. Haven’t you always wanted a child? Now you can be a mother at last. Please, Beth. Please!”
Silently I turned to Doug.
“No,” he said. “Absolutely not! If you want to adopt a baby, we can do it through the proper channels. We can’t get involved in this. If the police find out we’ve taken a kid that doesn’t belong to us, forged a birth certificate . . . if they found out that we knew what happened to that poor woman and didn’t tell them . . . What about her relatives? Her family? It’s just wrong, Beth. You know it is.”
I looked down at the baby. I knew Doug was right, but God, she was so beautiful. I loved her immediately, I think. She was so defenseless and alone. Her mother was dead; her father didn’t want her—what would happen to her now? I lifted her to my face and breathed in the delicious smell of her scalp. I think I already knew by then that I’d never be able to let her go.
Oliver seemed to find his voice at last. “All we ask is that you have her tonight. We can’t be seen with her—people will start asking questions. Please, just have her tonight and think about it.”
Rose caught hold of my hand. “I’m begging you, Beth, please help us.”
Doug shook his head and I pulled my hand away from Rose’s. “Doug,” I said, “can I talk to you in the kitchen for a moment?”
Once we’d shut the door behind us, Doug hissed, “There is no way we’re doing this, Beth.”
“Doug,” I began, but he cut me off.
“The very idea is insane. We can’t just take in someone else’s child! A woman died tonight. We should tell the police!”
We must have been in there for half an hour, arguing back and forth. I think I just wore him down in the end. “It’s one night,” I promised him. “Just one night. Let the baby have a good night’s sleep in peace and we’ll decide what to do in the morning. Please, Doug,” I said, “please.” I think he knew that there would be no talking me out of it and eventually, reluctantly he agreed. “One night,” he said. “That’s all.”
We went back to the living room. “All right,” I said. “We’ll look after her tonight.” I could hardly look at Oliver as he thanked us, his eyes full of shame and gratitude.
After they had left, Doug and I took care of Lana. We fed her, changed her, and made her a makeshift bed next to ours. She was such a good little soul, so peaceful and quiet. I did with her what I’d never allowed myself to do with any of the babies I’d looked after in the hospital: I closed my eyes and held her to me and let myself pretend that she was mine. She seemed to fit in the crook of my neck so perfectly; it felt so right to have her snuggled against me.
When she was sleeping peacefully, I took a deep breath and steeled myself to talk to Doug. “I know the circumstances are awful,” I began cautiously, whispering in the darkness, “but this, surely, is the answer to our prayers. You heard Rose: she’ll get us the necessary paperwork so we can get a birth certificate saying she’s ours. They’ll think Lana died with her mother, that her body was lost at sea. No one need ever know.”
He kept repeating the same thing, saying it was morally wrong, that we could get into terrible trouble. I thought I’d never change his mind. But when Lana woke a few hours later in the middle of the night, I passed her to him while I went to make up her milk. When I came back, he was sitting on the end of the bed holding her, an expression on his face as he gazed down at her that I’d never seen before. It was a scene I’d imagined so many times throughout those endless years and years of hope and disappointment, and I felt a lump lodge itself in my throat. I sat down next to him and silently passed him the bottle.
“I was thinking,” he murmured as we watched her drink. “What if you’re right? What if this is our only chance? If we never did manage to have our own, or for some reason couldn’t adopt. What then?” He looked at me. “You’d never forgive me, would you?” He sighed and added, “I don’t think I’d ever forgive myself.”
I closed my eyes. Could this be true? Could we really be about to do this? Careful not to disturb Lana, I put my arms around him. We both watched as she fell asleep again, her little head with its beautiful thick dark hair on his chest. Our daughter. I felt overcome with happiness.
The days following our decision were utterly surreal. The practicalities of adjusting to new parenthood, the fear of what would happen if we were discovered, the guilt we felt about her real family, were interspersed with the pure joy of having Lana so suddenly and unexpectedly in our lives. She was absolutely perfect. We decided to call her Hannah after my grandmother, and that was when it suddenly began to feel real, that she was really and forever ours. But there was a huge amount of fear and anxiety too. We had to keep her existence secret from the world
