“Of course,” Natalie said, glancing in the rearview mirror to see her daughter’s brows knitting together over the bridge of her pert nose. The last thing Natalie had expected she’d be thinking about that afternoon was her birth mother. “Just trying to figure out what I’m going to make us for dinner.”
“Risotto!” Hailey said. She loved to watch cooking shows and had taken to making a list of all the different meals she’d like to try. After overhearing Gordon Ramsay say, “Very good, that risotto!” on an episode of Hell’s Kitchen—which Natalie had turned off as soon as she realized that the majority of the show consisted of censored expletives—Hailey was now obsessed with the idea of the dish. She’d also adopted the famous chef’s phrase for her more general use—after eating dinner, she’d look at Natalie and say, “Very good, that macaroni!” or after a bath, “Very good, that shampoo!” Always wanting to emulate his big sister, Henry began copying her, too. The other night, when he refused to eat his vegetables, he’d thrown his fork on the table, screwed up his face, and said, “Very bad, that broccoli!”
“I think we’ll just have spaghetti,” Natalie told Hailey as they pulled up in front of Henry’s preschool. It was three thirty, and she was right on time to pick him up. Hailey liked to accompany Natalie inside so she could say hello to her old teachers. “You can help me make the salad.”
“Okay,” Hailey consented, and a moment later she and Natalie got out of the car, and together ran through the rain toward the building, holding hands.
? ? ?
Later that night, after the kids were tucked in and Natalie and Kyle were in their own bedroom, Natalie told her husband about Hailey’s family tree project. “It really made me think about my birth mom,” she said, curling up to her husband, draping one of her legs over his.
At five foot nine, her husband was seven inches taller than she was, built like a wrestler with thick muscular limbs. Name a sport and Kyle had played it, but his personal favorite, the one he still made time for, was racquetball. Any day he wasn’t in court, he’d spend his lunch hour with his friend John at the gym, sweating out the stress from his job. While Natalie supported her husband’s devotion to this activity, the only competition she wanted to participate in was being a contestant on Cupcake Wars; the only workout she enjoyed was speed-rolling hundreds of molasses cookies in crunchy, sparkling sugar for the PTA bake sale at Hailey’s school. Unlike her mother, Natalie was blessed with a metabolism that allowed her to eat whatever she wanted and didn’t require her to exercise in order to maintain her weight—another characteristic she wondered if she had inherited from the woman who’d given her up.
Kyle kissed the top of her head, then ran his fingers up and down her bare arm, giving her goose bumps. There was no place she felt safer than being tucked up against him. “I’ll bet,” he said. “You okay?”
“Sort of,” she said. Kyle knew any discussions of her birth mother dredged up emotions Natalie would rather not feel, and questions she’d probably never have answered. She turned her head to look at him. His eyes were a lighter shade of brown than hers, like copper, flecked with bits of green. Besides his big heart and great sense of humor, they were among the things Natalie loved most about him.
They had met nine years ago, when he was thirty and she was twenty-six. He’d joined her father’s practice about four months after she had, but as they never were assigned to the same case, their interactions were limited to the passing-each-other-in-the-hallway, head-bobbing, hi-how-are-you variety. She knew her father liked Kyle—he’d even gone so far as to say that the younger man was one of the top up-and-coming lawyers in the firm. She’d witnessed more than one female in the office lingering around him, asking insipid questions, and laughing too loudly at his jokes. Like them, she couldn’t help but notice his good looks—in contrast to the well-cut, buttoned-up suits he wore, he had longish, wavy, dark brown hair, full lips, and an easy smile—and while dating among associates wasn’t strictly forbidden as long as it was reported to Human Resources, Natalie preferred to keep her relationships in the workplace on a professional level.
Her and Kyle’s first substantive conversation occurred at the beginning of her second year at the firm, when she was asked to do some research for a first-degree murder case in which he was defending a woman accused of killing her husband.
“Do you have a minute?” she’d asked, standing in the doorway of his dark wood-paneled office, holding a file in her right hand. He sat at his desk, staring at a stack of photos in his hands.