Then Came You - Jennifer Weiner [111]
“I’m not as brave as she is,” I said, in a low voice.
He nodded. Then he hitched up his sagging pants and walked off, another New Yorker, just minding his own business. I went back to the office and sat behind my computer, ignoring the deadline on the latest pitch book, ignoring Rajit, who called on speakerphone from the Jitney to the Hamptons and berated me for mistakes actual and imagined. At night, I plodded home, bought a take-out salad, then sat at the half-size table in the kitchen, poking at it, afraid to call Kimmie or go to her apartment, the place where I belonged.
“What’s up with you?” Amanda asked.
“Bad day at work.” There was vodka in the freezer, grapefruit juice in the fridge. I mixed myself a drink, glugged it down like medicine, then lay on my bed for the first time in weeks, wondering what I was supposed to do now.
I’d just closed my eyes when Amanda knocked on my door. “You’re blowing up,” she said, holding out the BlackBerry I’d left in the kitchen. Hoping it might be Kimmie, I lifted the receiver to my ear. “Hello?”
The voice was crisp, and it took me a minute to recognize it. “Julie? It’s Leslie Stalling from the Princeton Fertility Clinic.”
“Yes?”
“Well,” Leslie began. She gave a nervous chuckle. “I can’t say I’ve ever had a conversation quite like this before. Let me start at the beginning. Your egg was used by a couple in New York City.”
My heart sped up. Hadn’t part of me always known it would happen this way, that I’d end up in the same city as the baby?
“The biological father died.”
“What?” I sat frozen as Leslie explained the rest of it—father dead, intended mother missing, twentysomething half sister left in charge. “She asked for your information,” Leslie concluded. “We can’t give that out, of course, but . . .”
“What’s her name?”
Leslie told me—name, address, email, phone numbers. Which left me with only one more question. “The baby?”
Her voice warmed. “She’s gorgeous. A beautiful little girl.”
Bettina Croft was waiting for me in the lobby of her apartment building on Central Park West. She shook my hand, led me to the elevator, and pressed the button for “Penthouse.” “We’ll talk upstairs,” she said. The elevator whizzed upward, giving me time to study her. She was about my age, in a scoop-necked black linen dress and black patent-leather slides: all of it simple and, I guessed, all expensive, too. Her only jewelry was a diamond circle pin at her collar. Her thick auburn hair was pushed back from her face by a black velvet headband, the way I bet she’d been wearing it since sixth grade. She was prettier than she’d looked in the picture I’d Googled on the way over. Her lips were thin, her chin a shade pointy, her teeth too big for her mouth. But her eyebrows were elegantly arched, her eyes wide and expressive beneath them, and she had beautiful skin, cream tinged with pink at her cheeks.
The elevator chimed. The doors slid open, and we stepped into a foyer, then into a living room as airy and high-ceilinged as a basketball court. Multicolored rugs glowed on the hardwood floors and important art hung on the walls. Vases and bowls full of fresh-cut, beautifully arranged flowers ornamented every corner and there was something astonishing to see everywhere I turned. I walked to the windows, past a glass vase filled with flowering cherry blossoms and a framed Picasso hanging on the wall like it didn’t know it wasn’t in a museum. Looking out over the twinkling lights and the treetops of Central Park, I wished that Kimmie was with me. She’d appreciate this apartment, she’d notice things I didn’t, she’d hold my hand while we talked about it on her futon—how many bedrooms did we think it had, and how many people worked to clean it, and how much did it cost to live in a place like this.
“So what can I do for you?” I asked.
Bettina sat on a long, curving couch upholstered in a shimmery fabric somewhere between silver and beige, and studied me, as frankly as Jared Baker had long ago in the mall. “Figures. You’re exactly the type India would go for.”
“What do