A column of messages from Floss, delivered while Orla hacked at the wall, was waiting.
Don’t want to overstep but I thought of a cool name, if it’s a girl. Wanna hear
Marlow
Because it has all the letters of your name
Like you’d always be with her
Just a suggestion, of course
Orla began to cry. She cried the way she hadn’t since she started living with roommates. Her weeping echoed off the walls of the newly empty apartment. It came to Orla suddenly, the key that had eluded her all her life. There was only one trick to making a choice, and that was doing it fast.
I like Marlow, Orla texted back. And the baby is a girl.
Then, before she could think better of it:
Actually
Can you come over?
* * *
The time between then and now had been a blur of paperwork and meetings and consent. Over and over, Orla consented. She signed all the standard contracts surrendering her parental rights, and she signed plenty of other things that had been drawn up just for them. When she got to the agreement that called for her to stay inside for the last two months of her pregnancy, Orla looked up from her place at the table, where she sat alone. “This seems intense,” she said.
Every face on the other side—Floss and Aston’s legal team ran six deep—smiled. Someone patiently explained. It was presumed that the three of them would do a magazine cover after Marlow was born, with an exclusive tell-all on their “extraordinary arrangement,” as Melissa had them calling it. A stray paparazzi shot of Orla would complicate the negotiations. They had been lucky that there hadn’t been any so far.
So Orla stayed inside. She confronted Polly’s notes and worked on adding to her manuscript. When she ran out of things to do and went down to get her junk mail, she tilted her head against the front door’s glass and checked for Mrs. Salgado. Orla never left anymore, and neither did Anna’s mother. She just sat in her lawn chair and knit. Sometimes, when the wind blew down Twenty-First Street, the end of her work would lift and flutter across the door, so Orla could see it from the lobby. The scarf that Mrs. Salgado was making was coming along nicely.
* * *
On the plane to St. Lucia, Orla’s pretending to sleep finally turned into sleeping. She woke to the doctor gently shaking her arm. She blinked her eyes open and looked at him. He was younger than she expected, maybe in his early forties, tall, Indian, with a neat, trim waist and dark eyes that he held politely at half-mast as he roused her.
“Orla,” he said. “I’m Dr. Kodali. Do you mind if I check your vitals? And I’d like to have you stand, for a minute, to help your circulation.” He offered his arm formally, with a hint of a smile, like he was asking her to dance.
Soon, they were on the ground, saying goodbye to the pilot, descending to a waiting town car. It sped off as soon as Dr. Kodali pulled the door shut. The car clung to the tight curves that wound up the island’s mountains. The baby shifted inside Orla, following the pull of the wheels.
They moved, after a long while, back toward the ground, and passed the long lanes to several brand-name resorts. The driver braked his way down a hill. Banana tree fronds brushed the roof of the car. When the trees parted, they were in the brick driveway of a cream-colored, Spanish-style building. A woman in a perfectly pressed white polo emerged and got Orla’s bag from the trunk, then Dr. Kodali’s. Carrying the bags as if they weighed nothing, she skirted the blue-tiled fountain and led them down a footpath, toward a villa set apart from the resort’s main house. The woman spoke quietly the whole time. Orla could tell that she was imparting information about the resort and how to enjoy it, but she couldn’t hear a word and didn’t think she would need it, anyway. She was under strict orders to remain indoors or on her balcony, resting, and to call Dr. Kodali first if she needed to go anywhere.
The woman stopped under the bulb that lit the villa’s vestibule. She handed each of them a key. Dr. Kodali’s door was to the left, Orla’s to the right.
“Second floor there is a hot tub on each of your verandas,” the woman whispered.