Moonlight Road (Virgin River #11)(94)

They exchanged curiously puzzled looks and she thought, Aha! They won’t go for that!

“Now, doesn’t that just make sense?” Darla said. “I have to admit, if I were forced to have someone else raise a child of mine, it would sure give me comfort to know they were growing up strong and good.”

“That can be awfully complicated, you know,” Mel said. “Having some biological parent looking things over all the time, maybe considering trying to interfere if she doesn’t like the way things are going….”

Phil laughed. “Any more complicated than my cranky old dad watching that farm like he didn’t retire twenty years ago? Threatening to take it back from me and my brother every other day?” He laughed and Darla joined him. “Mel, when you own a big herd and try to make your living off Mother Nature, you better be able to take complications in stride. No one more fickle than Mother Nature.” He looked at Darla. “Didn’t we surely learn that when trying to breed up our own family?”

Mel put the material back in the envelope. “Well, looks like it’s all here to me, unless you change your minds and decide to be more specific about the kind of child you’re looking for. Or—unless you want to try having your own just once more. You carried the last one pretty long—eighteen weeks.”

Darla shook her head. “I’m afraid I’m just not up to it. I not only feel the loss so much, but I end up feeling like a failure. I know that’s just silly, but…”

“I know the feeling,” Mel said. “But how about a surrogate? Did you talk about that?”

“We did. It sounds like a pretty reasonable option for folks like us. But I’m thirty-five and Phil’s thirty-eight. It’s time for us to stop playing the conception lottery. Like I said, that money can start a college fund. You can bet there aren’t any rich babies up for adoption. If we get a baby, it’ll be a little one that no one could do that for. But we can. We’ve always had everything. Everything but children.”

Phil sat back in his chair. “Gotta get me a kid to pester and hound the way my old man does me. Can’t wait till I get to turn over the farm and then show up every day to tell him what he’s doing wrong,” he joked.

“Oh, Phil,” Darla lightly scolded. “Your dad tries to help. He means well.”

“What if a baby…or a young child, for that matter…never materializes for you?” she asked them.

“Well,” Phil said. “If that happens, I guess we’ll die with a lot of excess love in our hearts.” He put his arm around his wife’s shoulders. “There are worse things.”

“Well, good luck with this,” Mel said, handing them the envelope.

“Would you keep it, Mel? You have all the women patients in Virgin River. We’re giving a packet like that to an agency in Eureka and another one to the biggest OB in the county. But maybe someone around here will turn up, right here where we live. If you come across anyone who needs us, would you mind just telling them? Maybe give out one of our résumés?”

“Sure,” she said. “Sure, I can do that.”

And she recalled—it happened just like this so many times that it was almost impossible to think of it as a coincidence. The first time was years ago, in L.A., when a young woman came into the hospital clinic, sobbing, saying she couldn’t bring herself to terminate, but she was in no place to raise a child—the father didn’t want her, wouldn’t help, her parents were furious, et cetera, et cetera. Two hours later a woman in her thirties who had had a hysterectomy brought in an adoption résumé and asked if they knew of anyone looking for adoptive parents…. They came so close together they practically passed each other in the doorway. Mel had put them together and felt such a rush of warmth at having had a hand in making everyone’s life a little richer.

She didn’t feel that way at the moment. She stood up and put out a hand. “I’ll let you know if I hear of anyone.”

Darla took her hand first, then Phil did. “Thanks, Mel—you’re just a treasure. We know it’ll probably take a long time. We’re patient. But giving that to you—that’s the closest thing to having an angel in charge we can think of.”

Hah! Mel thought. If only you knew! “Now, don’t go giving me credit I don’t deserve,” she said, smiling. “I don’t know of anyone at this point.”

She walked them to the front door, bid them goodbye, then went back to the office. Well, she still had some measure of control here—once Marley and Jake chose her as the adoptive mother, all would be well. It wouldn’t take them long, either. They’d met with Brie right away. Mel would be the prenatal practitioner of choice, and Marley might even be open to her delivering the baby. Worst case, she could direct Marley and Jake to John Stone, who would certainly let her in the room. They would be so relieved to have a close friend of Rick and Liz as the mother of their child.

She slipped the envelope into the bottom desk drawer. If she held her arms in just a certain way, she could almost feel the weight of the infant’s head in the crook. If she just left that envelope in the drawer for a couple of weeks, a few at the most, her deal with Marley and Jake would be final. She’d even let them name the baby. That would convince them she was perfect!

It had happened this way so often, that the birth mother and the adoptive mother found each other by the merest chance, just when it needed to happen. Not only had it happened in Mel’s practice, but she’d heard similar stories from so many nurses and doctors.