but we had trouble getting pregnant. We tried and tried. We were that couple that did way too many IVFs and IUIs, and it started to eat at our marriage. You can only deal with getting your hopes up so many times before you fall apart. It got bad once the doctor told us we had to stop. I was a wreck, especially. We toyed with adoption, but that didn’t work out either.” The word adoption squeezed her heart.
Whitaker raised an eyebrow. “How did that not work out? Aren’t you guaranteed a child when you adopt?”
“Yeeaaaah, but . . . it’s a long story.” And she really didn’t want to ever revisit it again, but she knew she needed to. “We thought we had a baby. Came home early from a trip with assurances from our lawyer. We met the mother, and she loved us.” Claire looked up and added, “You have to meet the mother and get her approval before you can meet the baby. So the baby was in the nursery. We went home feeling like it was happening. But we received a call that night, as we were getting the nursery ready. A different adoption agency had come in and talked the mother into giving the baby to another couple. Apparently, they’d offered her money under the table. Our lawyer was furious; we were destroyed.”
Claire took a big sip of her wine to slow her elevated heart rate. Those days had been so awful, sitting on the floor in the nursery holding the toys and touching the clothes she’d begun to collect, the ones that a baby might never touch.
Once she’d collected herself, Claire told Whitaker what she’d never told anyone. “That was it for me. I couldn’t keep trying. David attempted to make me feel better, promised me we’d eventually find our true baby. I told him I was done.” The confession stopped in the air in front of her, and she fought to hold back a cry. “And I said . . .”
Whitaker reached across the table. “We can do this later.”
Claire shook him off and coughed up the words as if she had to get them out before they choked her. “I told him that if he loved me, he’d have to let this dream of ours go. That I couldn’t bear another failed attempt. I told him we weren’t meant to be parents.”
Claire felt the tears collecting under her eyes. But she didn’t want to cry, not anymore. “He hugged me and told me that I was all he ever needed, that we didn’t need a child, that he couldn’t be more content.” Claire scratched the table, feeling David’s breath on her neck. And she could hear the bitterness in her tone as she said, “But apparently, according to his secret book, he wasn’t content at all. It reads to me as if he wrote it to experience what it was like to be a father. I guess Orlando was the child he never had.” Claire touched her flat, empty belly. “What we could never have.”
Whitaker put his elbows on the table. “Don’t let yourself get caught up in regret. You two went through a lot. Like you said, he was happy when he died. That’s what matters most.”
Claire nodded. “I know.” Whitaker had a good point, and it was probably the one positive that had gotten her through the first three years.
“Okay,” Whitaker said. “Enough prying. And, Claire, we can always wrap up and go at it again tomorrow.”
“No, let’s keep going.”
Whitaker wrapped his fingers around the stem of his wineglass. “Why Sarasota for the setting? Was David from there?”
Claire shook her head. “No, but he traveled there sometimes. He was doing projects all over Florida. He’s actually from Tampa.”
“Oh, gotcha. You’re from Chicago, right? You met up there or . . . ?”
Claire loved the story of how they met, but everything was pressing down on her. One of the tears she’d attempted to suppress rolled down her cheek, and she turned so that he wouldn’t see it.
But he did see it. “You know what? Let’s take a break. This is all tough. We have plenty of time to talk. I think you get the picture. To do this right, I have to understand him. And I suspect to understand David, I need to understand you too.”
“Yeah, I get it.” Claire quickly lifted her glasses and wiped her eyes.
Leaving the topic, they made small talk for a while, getting to know