The Swap - Robyn Harding Page 0,16

address. We went back to the hotel, where I fell on the bed and wept. Brian paced the room, muttering incredulities to himself. In the morning, I called the agency.

“What’s going on? Did she change her mind?”

“She may have,” the woman said. “Or . . . it’s possible there’s no baby.”

“What?”

“Some girls like the attention. The gifts and the messages.”

“But we saw her bump! She sent us the ultrasound photo!”

I heard the woman sigh. “There are websites devoted to faking a pregnancy.”

“Are you kidding me?”

“These sites offer fake test results, sonogram images, latex bumps and breasts. We try to do our due diligence, but sometimes they slip through the cracks. I’m sorry.”

Our baby had never existed, but to me, she had died. I took a leave from work to grieve in private. In addition to our loss, I was humiliated by our gullibility. We had wanted a baby so badly that we’d ignored the red flags. Friends, relatives, and colleagues would be talking about us. How could we not have seen that Mia was a liar? That her bump was fake? That her parents would have been involved if she was legitimately pregnant? And then, Brian suggested the move.

I needed counseling; I can see that now. But starting a new life seemed more important. I could seek help when we were settled . . . except that Hawking was sorely lacking in mental-health services. Even if there had been a psychologist, residents would have been too embarrassed to visit. Everyone knows everything in a town this size. So I had suffered in silence. And then, one day, Freya walked into my shop. She charmed me, lifted me out of my funk, convinced me that I could be happy again.

Freya’s friendship was my lifeline.

11

Most people were wowed by Freya’s beauty, style, and charisma, but there was more to her than that. She was creative, visionary, a truly talented artist. She had come into my store carrying a large cardboard box. She’d set it on the countertop and extracted several pottery pieces. The bowls, vases, and platters were somehow rugged and delicate at the same time, the glazes evoking the sea and the sky and the beach. They fit perfectly into my aesthetic, and I knew I had to stock them.

I’d suggested we discuss terms over coffee, so we moved to a cozy café across the street. At a tiny table, with two steaming lattes (Freya’s was a beet latte with almond milk), we discovered we had much in common. In addition to sharing a passion for art and design, we were the same age, married without children, and struggling to adapt to our new environment. And though we didn’t articulate it then, we were both lonely. I think we recognized that in each other.

Soon, we were seeing each other on a regular basis: for coffee, lunch, or wine. We had dinner with our husbands twice—once at Freya’s magnificent waterfront home, once at our modest bungalow. I’d been ashamed of our slightly run-down cottage set back in the woods, but Freya and Max pronounced it “homey and cozy.” Despite their differences, the guys had hit it off, too. Brian and I had never really had “couple” friends. In the past, I would become friendly with a woman only to discover her partner was a pompous ass. Brian would introduce me to his buddy’s wife, who’d turn out to be competitive and snarky. But we liked Max and Freya in equal measure.

One night at dinner, when Freya bemoaned the island’s lack of a SoulCycle, we planned more vigorous visits. On Tuesday and Thursday mornings, before I opened the store, we went for a forest hike. It was a walk, really, the path meandering gently through the woods and along the coastline. The rain forest felt magical, almost prehistoric with its massive cedars, abundant ferns, curtains of moss. It was on these walks, our environment so private, isolated, almost confessional, that our friendship grew and deepened.

Our standing date was weather dependent, of course. The island got a lot of rain, which Freya struggled with. It can be depressing for people who come from sunnier climes, but I was used to it. I’d spent my entire life in the Pacific Northwest—or as we Canadians call it, the South Coast. I was born and raised in Vancouver, moved to Seattle when I married Brian. I had spent my life in the gray and the gloom. It wasn’t the weather that caused my malaise.

It was a bright