Finding Colin Firth: A Novel (23 page)

“But then both worlds started suffering,” Gemma said, more statement than question.

“Exactly. Home and work. My marriage was a wreck. I blamed my husband for not helping more; he blamed me for being selfish and not agreeing to quit when we could swing it financially if we were careful. The pressure won and I quit, and suddenly I had three kids and had been out of the game so long I couldn’t see ever finding my way back to who I used to be.”

Who I used to be. That was exactly what Gemma was afraid of: waking up one day and wondering what had happened to the person she used to be.

“I know I’m not that woman,” Caitlin said. “I’m not twenty-five and childless and a rising young associate. But sometimes I hate who I am now. That my life feels like it’s not my own.
That’s how I felt at fifteen and pregnant. Like my life wasn’t my own. It wasn’t.” She shook her head. “Maybe it’s just me, though. I know two other attorneys at my old firm who have two kids and manage to put in their hours and be great moms. They make it work. I couldn’t.”

Gemma also could think of several working mothers who seemed to have great balance—exactly what she was hoping to achieve. “I really appreciate your being so open and honest. I think many women will be able to relate to how you feel.” Not Gemma’s sister-in-law, who’d had a very similar experience to Caitlin’s, minus the pregnancy at fifteen. Lisa Hendricks gave up a high-powered job to stay home with her baby and loved her life, every moment of it.
I was meant to be a mother
, Lisa said all the time.
My whole life has been leading me to this
, she’d say, wiping her toddler’s runny nose while patting her seven-months-pregnant belly.

“Do you have kids?” Caitlin asked Gemma.

“Not yet.”

Caitlin nodded. “I didn’t think so. You don’t look exhausted enough.”

Gemma smiled, but she wanted to cry.

“You remind me so much of who I used to be,” Caitlin said. “Here you are, conducting an interview, writing for the paper. Living your life, the one you probably imagined when you were a teenager.”

The sound of a car pulling into the driveway had Caitlin leaping up to peer out the window. “It’s my mother with the baby.” She glanced at her watch. “She’s a half hour early coming back. Lana must be fussing up a storm.”

Gemma stood up. “I won’t keep you then. Thank you so
much for your time, Caitlin. And I just want to say—maybe you can find a happy medium for yourself.”

The front door opened, and an older woman came in, carrying a beautiful baby, who was indeed fussing up a storm. “She’s been crying nonstop.”

Caitlin took the baby and bounced her a bit. “Right,” she said to Gemma with a roll of her eyes. “A happy medium.”

Gemma thought she might ask Caitlin’s mother a few questions about what it was like fifteen years ago when her daughter had been a teenage resident of Hope Home, but the woman was already rushing out the door, calling over her shoulder that she’d call Caitlin later.

“I can’t even sit down to a half-hour interview,” Caitlin said, shaking her head. “There is no happy medium.”

Gemma wished she knew what to say to make the woman’s resentment, the way she looked at her life, abate some. But what she’d said hit so close to home that all Gemma could do was wish Caitlin well. She’d send her a little something tomorrow, maybe a gift certificate to a restaurant in town where she and her husband could go if her mother or a sitter would watch the kids. Something to take her away from her life for a little bit.

Why was it this way for some women and not others? she wondered, thinking of herself and Caitlin in one dreary category and women like her sister-in-law, and her neighbor in New York City, Lydia Bessell, in the other. Mindset? You chose this or that because of this or that, though sometimes, of course, you had no choice whatsoever, and then there you were, in your life. There was another category, though. Mothers with full-time jobs who made their lives work—because they had to, because they wanted to. Gemma would be in that category. She would,
she assured herself. Despite how much Caitlin had wanted her life to work. Everyone was different.

Gemma didn’t even have a job. Or a baby yet. She had no idea what she was talking about, how anything would be. And that might be the scariest part of all.

After a long day of research and two more interviews—one with a current resident of Hope Home and another with a woman who’d adopted a baby from a Hope Home resident five years ago, Gemma arrived back at the inn at around five o’clock, desperate for a hot bubble bath and the new chapter of
Your Pregnancy This Week
.

A man sat on the porch swing, and from the distance of the driveway he looked so much like Alexander that for a moment, her heart swelled with such longing for her husband that she had to draw in breath. Despite everything happening between them right now, she missed him. She wished she could turn to him with all her fears, her worries, the way she’d always been able to. But she couldn’t in this case.

I do love you, Alexander, she thought. I do. So much. I just wish—

The man on the porch stood up. It
was
Alexander.

Gemma gasped as he came toward her without a word and wrapped his arms around her. She fell against him, holding him tight, so relieved to have him standing right here. Just let everything fall away and let your husband hold you, she told herself.

“I should have known you’d fly up here,” she said. “My head is in so many different places that I didn’t think of it.”

“No kidding.”
He offered a half smile and put his arm around her and they walked up the short stone path to the steps.

“We’re having a baby,” he whispered.

“I’m scared to death.”

“I’m not,” he said.

She led him into the inn, quiet on a sunny late afternoon. They headed up the stairs to the third floor, and Gemma unlocked her door.

The two of them barely fit in the room together. She drank in the sight of him; with all their arguing, she’d forgotten how attracted she was to Alex, how easily his face, his body, could overwhelm her. In her frame of mind and exhausted, she’d have to be careful around him. She needed a hot bath and her husband’s strong arms—but she couldn’t let him strong-arm her.

She closed the door behind him. “I can learn how to be a mother, I know that. But I can’t learn how to want what you want. I don’t want to move to the suburbs and be a stay-at-home mother. It’s wonderful for those who do want that, and yes, I get that it’s a blessing that we can afford it in the first place. But I want to be a reporter. I want to work on exactly the kind of stories I’m working on now. Tonight, a birth mother is meeting the daughter she gave up for adoption twenty-two years ago.”

He put her hand on her stomach. “I don’t see why you can’t do this from Westchester, then. You’ll work part-time at the local paper. If you’re assigned this story here, why not there?”

I’m not moving to Westchester to live next door to your family, dammit!
“I don’t want to leave the city.” The local newspaper might not hire her, anyway, she full well knew.

He shook his head and sat down on the edge of the bed. “Well, I do, Gem. And I’m not raising this baby in the city. I won’t.”

“Well, I won’t move to Westchester.”

“You’re so selfish!” he snapped.

“Did you come here to scream at me?”

He dropped his head back and let out a frustrated breath. “How are we going to work this out?”

She sat down beside him and took his hand, and he closed it tight around hers. “I don’t know. I just know that I want to stay here for the next couple of weeks and work on this story. I want to get used to being pregnant, come to terms with it. It’s completely unexpected.”

“Come to terms with it?” He shook his head. “Do you know how lucky we are?”

Why couldn’t he understand?

He sighed. “Fine, come to terms with it, if that’s what you have to do. If that’s what it takes to make you see that moving to Dobbs Ferry is in all our best interest. We’ll have my family right there for support, babysitting, community. The neighborhoods I’m interested in are full of young families like us. We’ll fit right in.”

“But I won’t.”

He closed his eyes in frustration. “I don’t know how you can stand this tiny room. Why not get a bigger room?”

“June gave me the dear-old-friend discount on this single,” she said. “The regular rooms go for almost two hundred a night, and I didn’t want to take a room away from a full-paying guest. And I like this room. It’s cozy. Isabel, June’s older sister, manages the inn and she’s been great to me.”

“I miss you, Gem.”

Tears filled her eyes. “I miss you too.”

He sat on the bed, leaning against the headboard, and pulled her back against his chest, wrapping his arms around her. “We’ll figure it out.”

How, though? Gemma wondered, Caitlin Auerman’s weary face flashing in her mind.

In a romantic little Mexican restaurant on a pier, Bea sat across from Patrick, the tall, dark, and intelligent second assistant director on the Colin Firth film, listening to him tell a hilarious story about an A-list movie star he’d once worked with, without mentioning names. She liked that he didn’t name-drop or talk behind the actors’ backs. She liked that he’d said some of the biggest movie stars were among the nicest people he’d ever met. She liked the way he listened intently to her, the warmth in his expression. She liked him. He was twenty-eight, from Seattle, and his dream was to direct interesting documentaries. He’d been around the world on various film shoots, but he wasn’t full of himself at all. And the more Bea looked at him, the hotter he got. He was exactly her height—at five feet ten, Bea rarely wore heels or she’d tower over most people—with narrow blue eyes, freckles, and sexy dark, wavy hair. He’d picked her up at the inn right on time, and they’d walked to the colorful restaurant, where he’d made a reservation, though at five o’clock it hadn’t been necessary.

After the waiter left with their orders, he asked her to tell him all about herself, and she wanted to blurt out that in less than three hours she’d be meeting her birth mother for the first time ever, but instead she found herself telling him about
her mother’s death and losing sight of her own dreams to be a teacher, and that maybe getting fired from her crutch job at Crazy Burger had been a blessing in disguise.

“What brought you to Boothbay Harbor, Maine?” he asked, swiping a tortilla chip through the excellent dish of salsa between them.

She explained about the letter from her mother. The weeks she’d spent walking around Boston, going back and forth about looking up her birth mother. And then finally deciding to drive up to Maine to check her out. “I won’t name names, either, but the reason I’ve been hanging around the film set is because my birth mother—who I’m meeting for the first time later tonight—is one of the extras. I found out she was working on the film and just wanted to look around.”

He raised his margarita glass to her. “I admire what you’re doing, Bea. That takes guts. All of it. Especially after getting hit with such a whopper of a letter like that. Have you gotten a little more used to it all?”

“I guess. Sometimes it feels like it can’t possibly be true, but then I take out my mom’s letter and reread it, and I know it is true.”

“I’m doubly sorry that Tyler—the production assistant—was giving you a hard time yesterday. But then again, if he hadn’t been, I might not have overheard you guys arguing and I might not have seen you at all. I’m pretty glad I did.”

She smiled. “Me too.”

When their entrées arrived—enchiladas suizas for Bea, and steak fajitas for Patrick—they talked about everything and anything, from movies they both liked and hated, to books, to places they’d traveled—he had Bea beat there—and the weirdest foods they’d
tried. Bea told him about having to measure her Mt. Vesuvius burgers to make sure they were exactly one foot tall, and he told her about filming on location near the volcano in Italy. They talked so easily, so naturally, and Bea found herself laughing for what felt like the first time in a month. Maybe months.

After dinner, they had coffee and split a basket of cinnamon churros, then headed out to the back deck overlooking the bay, where they both tried to pick up a crab from the touch tank, but they’d been bested by an eight-year-old who picked it up without getting pinched.