This was our last shot. We can't afford it anymore. We're already in debt up to our ears for the last one. This was it. It's not going to happen."
"What happened to the adoption process?"
Tabitha wiped her eyes. "Because of Chad's disability, we got passed over again. Might as well be a dead end. And I'm sorry, I know it's selfish, but is it so wrong to want one of our own? Just one?"
Ingrid had been there since the beginning of Chad and Tabitha's journey: she knew all about the turkey basters (the IUI treatment), the hormone pills, the infertility cocktail (Clomid, Lupron); she had helped push syringes as big as horse needles into Tabitha's left hip at the designated hours. She knew how much they wanted a baby. Tabitha kept a photo on her desk of her and Chad at a luau during their honeymoon in Kona, goofy in Hawaiian shirts and leis. It was fifteen years old.
"Maybe I'm just not meant to be a mother," Tabitha cried.
"Don't say that! It's not true!"
"Why not? It's not as if there's anything anyone can do to help." Tabitha sighed. "I have to stop hoping."
Ingrid gave her friend another tight hug and walked out of the office, her cheeks burning and her heart thumping in her chest because she of all people knew that what Tabitha said wasn't true. There was someone who could help, someone who could change her life, someone much closer to Tab than she thought. But my hands are tied, Ingrid said to herself. There's nothing I can do for her. Not without breaking the bonds of the restriction. Not without putting myself in danger as well.
She went back to her station behind the front desk, just another small-town librarian immersed in her daily task. Her sweater was still damp from her friend's tears. If Ingrid had never resented their situation before, had never chafed against the restriction that was placed upon them before, well. There was always a first time for everything.
Chapter three
Home Fires
Old houses had a way of getting under your skin, Joanna Beauchamp knew; not just your skin but into your soul, as well as deep into your pocketbook, defying reason or logic in an ever-elusive quest for perfection. Over the years, the Beauchamp homestead, a stately colonial built in the late 1740s with pretty gables and a saltbox roof located right on the beach, in the older part of town, had been refashioned in many ways: walls torn down, kitchens moved, bedrooms redistributed. It was a house that had weathered many seasons and storms, and its crumbling walls echoed with memories - the massive brick fireplace had kept them warm for countless winters, the multitude of stains on the marble-topped kitchen counters recalled various cozy repasts. The living room floors had been stripped, redone, then stripped again. Now oak, then travertine, currently wood again - a gleaming red cherry. There was a reason old houses were called money pits, white elephants, folly.
Joanna enjoyed putting the house in order on her own. To her, a home renovation was constantly evolving and never quite finished. Plus, she preferred doing it herself; the other week she had personally retiled and grouted the guest bathroom. Today she was tackling the living room. She dipped her roller back into the aluminum tray of paint. The girls would laugh - they teased her for her habit of changing the wall colors several times a year on a whim. One month the living room walls were a dull burgundy, the next a serene blue. Joanna explained to her daughters that living in a static house, one that never changed, was stifling and suffocating, and that changing your environment was even more important than changing your clothes. It was summer, hence the walls should be yellow.
She was wearing her usual tromp-about-the-house attire: a plaid shirt and old jeans, plastic gloves, green Hunter boots, a red bandanna over her gray hair. Funny, that gray. No matter how often she dyed her hair, when she woke up in the morning it was always the same color, a brilliant silver shade. Joanna, like her daughters, was neither old nor young, and yet their physical appearances corresponded to their particular talents. Depending on the situation, Freya could be anywhere from sixteen to twenty-three years of age, the first blush of Love, while Ingrid, keeper of the Hearth, looked and acted anywhere from twenty-seven to thirty-five; and since Wisdom came from experience, even if in her heart