“Hello, Francesca.”
Tara thrust out a hand. “Hi, I’m Tara. Francesca’s daughter.”
“Isaac McCrea.” He shook her hand, then ignored her. “The buyers signed the contract today. Occupancy is set for November twenty-fourth.”
His eyes were hazel, with black lashes and eyebrows. Yeah, the resemblance to Dangerous Dan was there, alongside the differences. Great chin, nice jaw, straighter hair, more interesting eyes... In Tara’s arms, Laura stirred, made a soft crying sound.
She would have to get the milk and supplemental feeder from the cooler in the car. Her plan was to link up with some of Francesca’s nursing moms, see if any would donate breast milk.
“Is there something I can do to change your mind, Dr. McCrea?” asked Francesca.
“No.” He shook his head.
“Is it because I’m a midwife?”
Tara liked the direct question, the only relevant question. Relevant to everything when one’s life was midwifery—in the United States.
“Of course not.”
“Then, perhaps, when I find a new place for my home and office,” Francesca suggested, “you’ll be willing to serve as backup physician.”
Gutsy, Mom! Incision Dan’s brother serve as backup for the local midwife?
“I have no maternity insurance. I don’t do births.”
Didn’t do births? Tara broke in. “Aren’t you an obstetrician?”
“Family practice. You’re thinking of my brother.”
She blushed. On the phone, months and months ago, Francesca had said he was an obstetrician; but that was when he was new to town. Or maybe there was confusion with his brother, who’d lived in Precipice for years. In any case, Francesca had been getting flak from the hospital about her homebirth practice, and she always assumed the worst.
From the corner of her eye, Tara glimpsed motion. “Your car is rolling.”
The Land Cruiser connected with a house-sized boulder behind it and stopped.
“Not anymore.” Unconcerned about his children releasing the parking brake? Backing away, he murmured, “Enjoy your visit,” and he was partway to his car before he turned and looked at Tara.
She felt to her bones what he saw.
A woman with a newborn and a slender body and flat stomach. Quelling panic, fear of discovery, she grinned. “Bye, doc.”
“TARA. YOUR ETHICS!”
“Ethics, schmethics. This has nothing to do with being a midwife.”
“You attended that child’s birth! You can’t just keep the baby! And you can’t raise a child alone.”
“What would you have done?”
Francesca thought, We’ve been here a hundred times before. Butting heads. “I would have driven straight back to Maternity House. What possessed you to do anything different?”
“I told you. I swore—”
“The mother is clearly not dead.”
“Maybe, maybe not. But her wishes were obvious. She considered herself dead—to this child. And now, Laura can grow up knowing that her mother and I made a pact, rather than that her mother abandoned her, which is the story she’d hear if she was adopted by strangers.”
Francesca pressed her lips together. The baby was darling, with her thatch of dark hair and huge dark eyes. I don’t dare hold her. But Tara... Tara was nursing her with supplemental milk. Ten to twelve times a day. What was she thinking? “Tara, that baby is stolen. From the next couple in the state of Texas waiting to adopt a child.”
Tara had already considered that. “I disagree. Julia fostered her out—informally—to me. People have done it forever, everywhere. Uther Pendragon handed Arthur to Merlin, who gave him to Sir Ector to raise. Dad told me about an Eskimo lady giving her second son to a woman who had none, for the strength of the community—”
Francesca rolled her eyes. She’d once heard Charlie convince a man that moose turn into caribou when they cross the Arctic Circle. “Things have changed, Tara.”
“But remember how it was in Hawaii? Lots of adoption within families. Fostering and adoption are ancient traditions—”
“And this is the dawn of the third millennium.”
Tara lifted the infusion of fenugreek she’d brewed. “To a bright new century. Here we are. And I can help you. I’ll do the homebirths. You do the hospital births.”
“I’ve already told my homebirth clients that I can’t attend homebirths anymore. I can’t risk losing hospital privileges, and there’s simply too much pressure from the medical community.”
“Tara to the rescue. I’ll start a homebirth practice to fill in the gaps. After all, I have no hospital privileges to lose.”
“You should not be practicing in the state of Colorado, Tara. It’s not legal. In January—” Francesca began.
“Not an issue. These hands caught more than eight hundred babies just last year.”
“In Texas. I know your credentials, Tara. But the answer is no.”
The infant in her arms ceased sucking at Tara’s nipple and the tube from the supplemental feeder. Her head dropped away in slumber, and Tara carefully turned her to burp her.
Pretending not to see the bonding between her daughter and the newborn, Francesca watered pots of cacti in the solarium. The muscles in her shoulders ached. How could Tara have done it?
Only Tara would have done it.
And Tara was fragile as a cactus. Cacti seemed hardy, but if you ignored what they were and watered them too much... Was Tara really over Danny, over his running off with her partner, having a child with her partner? Now ex-partner.
How can I turn her away? Wandering to the kitchen, Francesca touched the soft cheek of the sleeping newborn. Skin so fine. The smell of her so new. “Do you even have her birth certificate?”
“No.” The solution—the last-gasp, avoid-losing-Laura solution—confronted Tara again. Surely it wouldn’t come to that.
“How do you plan to adopt her, Tara?”
“I’m working it out. Don’t worry. If I’m not worrying, why should you?”
Francesca folded her arms across her chest. Lines in her forehead deepened as she returned to the solarium. After a bit, she shook her head and muttered, “That man.”
“Isaac the Greedy? His kids are cute.” Releasing the parking brake.
“His children are in dire need of a mother.”
In dire need of a mother?
Tara came alert. “Where’s their mother?”
“I understand she’s dead.” Reluctantly, Francesca added, “In Rwanda. That’s where they came from.”
Rwanda?
Tara saw the terraced slopes, felt the heat and humidity, smelled the scents, the unique scents of that country, the faces of the people. She had read the newspapers and books in ’94 and since, and cried for Rwanda.
She placed Laura in a sling against her chest, a style she’d learned in South America,