Page 47 of Bonds of Shame, Bonds of Lust

He was already stepping away.

Just when he seemed human, he was infuriating. As always.

Jessica made two more passes through her imaginary galaxy before she slowed.

She slid out of the tube on her own and I lifted her down. She was lighter than I remembered, or maybe I always forgot between visits how small she still was inside all that big personality. She looked around the quiet room, then at me.

She raised her arms. "Uppie."

I picked her up.

She settled against me immediately, the way tired children do. Completely, trustingly, her head finding the curve of my neck like it belonged there. I stood holding her, one hand on her small back, feeling her ribcage rise and fall, the repaired heart working quietly beneath my palm. The heart I had been part of maintaining. The heart that had been broken before she was even born and was whole now, or as whole as we could make it.

"Can you tell me a story, Dr. Lacey?"

"What kind of story?"

She considered this with great seriousness, eyes half-closed. "The fox and the bunny."

So I told her about the fox and the bunny. Then the mouse and the lion, because she asked for it before the first one was finished. Her weight grew heavier as she drifted toward the edge of sleep but kept pulling herself back, like children do when they don't want the story to stop.

I didn't want it to stop either.

I stood in the quiet of the imaging suite, holding a child who was not mine, telling her stories in the middle of a Tuesday afternoon, and I let myself enjoy it without managing it from the safe distance I usually kept. There was no safe distance with Jessica. This small warm person who trusted me with her complete and boneless self.

Then Jessica lifted her head, suddenly wide awake. She looked like she had a big thought.

She put both small hands on my cheeks, framing my face the way she had with the drawing. Deliberately, making absolutely sure she had my full attention before she said the important thing.

Her eyes were very serious.

"Dr. Lacey. Are you a mommy?"

The question landed somewhere I kept padded but could never quite armor enough.

"No, sweetheart." My voice came out slightly unsteady. "I'm not a mommy. But I get to take care of lots of kids like you, so I think I'm pretty lucky."

She considered this with the focused patience of a child who senses something is being left out of the answer.

"But you're so good at stories," she said finally.

"Thank you," I said, not having the courage to say more.

"And you're really nice." She patted my cheek, once, deliberate. "And you fixed my heart." Another pat. "So you should definitely be a mommy."

"That's one of the kindest things anyone has ever said to me," I told her. I felt my heart being squeezed almost painfully.

She wasn't finished. She cupped my face more firmly in her small hands, thumbs on my cheekbones, and looked at me with the gravity of someone issuing a decree.

"If you're not a mommy yet," she said, "you could be MY mommy."

The words went through me as light goes through glass.

I couldn't answer right away. I didn't trust myself to speak. She was warm and heavy against me, her head tucked back into my neck, the repaired heart I kept safe beating quiet and steady under my palm.

I thought of the clinic waiting room and its terrible magazines. The grain of the kitchen table under my hands. Brad's voice, flat and ungentle. It's you, Lacey. You're infertile. I thought of the whole future I had built and furnished in my head across years of wanting it, the small hands, the bedtime stories read until the words ran together, the crayon drawings going up on a refrigerator door, and the way every piece of it had dissolved in a single sentence on an ordinary afternoon, vanished to where things go when they were never going to exist.

I fixed children's hearts because my love had to go somewhere, and I had made it go here, into this wing, into the charm on my stethoscope and the drawings above my desk and the small warm people who raised their arms and trusted me to hold them.