The Baby Wait
Nothing will stand in her way…Sarah Tennyson has it all planned. In two months she' ll travel to China to adopt the beautiful baby girl she' s always wanted. Even after a mountain of setbacks, she has the faith that one day she' ll hold her daughter. But that' s before the man she loves starts to doubt….Joe is Mr. Fix-It. The only thing he can' t do is get Sarah her baby. Now, after all the disappointment they' ve faced, he' s begun to wonder if their little family was really meant to be.Sarah can' t give up her dream, but what if waiting for her baby means losing Joe?SUDDENLY A PARENTLife will never be the same.
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“You’ve never had any faith in this, have you, Joe? So why’d you go along with it?”
“Because. You. Want. A. Baby. The one damn thing I can’t build for you with my own two hands. If I could, I’d go turn one out on a lathe for you right this very minute. I can’t buy a baby. I can’t borrow it. I can’t make it. Do you know how that makes me feel? To see you crying and to know that I can’t fix it? Me? The guy who goes in behind crappy contractors and cleans up their messes for half the price?”
“We’re fixing it!” Hearing Joe say the things I’d suspected he’d been thinking ripped into me like a chain saw. “If you’ll just believe…”
Dear Reader,
Every year hundreds of babies from China find loving homes in the U.S. Each one of those stories has a happy ending where baby and parent are united at last. One of those happy endings is my own—my husband and I brought our daughter Kate home from China in 2002, when she was just eight months old.
Our wait, though long, was nothing like Sara and Joe’s, and my childhood was nothing like Sara’s. But I kept thinking, what if? What if something had happened? What sort of woman would hang on? Why? What would her husband, hiding his own broken heart, do?
I thoroughly enjoyed creating all the characters who people Joe and Sara’s world. Dublin, Georgia, is real—though I’ve taken small liberties with south Georgia geography and created the town of Campbell—which doesn’t exist. Also, for dramatic reasons I chose a shorter initial Wait; the current wait, which fluctuates, is now about a year. Joe and Sara’s story isn’t my story—it’s theirs…and I hope you enjoy reading it as much as I enjoyed writing it.
If you’re interested in adopting from China, see links from my Web site, www.cynthiareese.net, which will point you in the right direction. I look forward to hearing from readers!
Cynthia Reese
For Kate,
My sweetie-pie, my miracle baby, the gift
God gave me…I love you!
This book would not exist without the help of
so many people: my editor, Laura Shin, who took a chance on me, and other Harlequin editors— Jennifer Green, who listened to me stammer out this idea, and Ann Leslie Tuttle, who called it the book of my heart. Thanks, too, go to my agent, Miriam Kriss; to my critique partners: Cindy Miles, Steph B., Tawna Fenske, Nelsa, R, and Babette D.; to my husband, who thinks I’m welded to my laptop; to Tessa Hill for an inside look at how adoption agencies work (any errors are my own); to my sister and my mom for believing in me; to the 2005 BIAYers and to the entire staff at Bellevue Avenue Post Office—thanks for getting my work to my editors on time, every time!
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Cynthia Reese lives with her husband and their daughter in south Georgia, along with two dogs, three cats and however many strays show up for morning muster on their back deck. She has been scribbling since she was knee-high to a grasshopper and reading even before that. A former journalist, teacher and English professor, she also enjoys cooking, traveling and photography when she gets the chance. The Baby Wait is her first book.
An invisible red thread connects those who are
destined to meet, regardless of time, place or circumstance. The thread may stretch or tangle, but will never break.
—An ancient Chinese belief
CONTENTS
CHAPTER ONE
CHAPTER TWO
CHAPTER THREE
CHAPTER FOUR
CHAPTER FIVE
CHAPTER SIX
CHAPTER SEVEN
CHAPTER EIGHT
CHAPTER NINE
CHAPTER TEN
CHAPTER ELEVEN
CHAPTER TWELVE
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
CHAPTER NINETEEN
CHAPTER TWENTY
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
CHAPTER ONE
I STOOD in an airport, not an English printed word or a Caucasian face in sight. Old Chinese women swarmed me like an angry colony of bees. They shook their fingers in my face. They looked me up and down, jerking their heads in disdain. I could not understand a single word they said. Finally, one tiny, shrunken lady shoved her face close to mine and in broken English shouted, “Missy, you forgot baby! No lucky baby for you!”
Another Chinese lady whipped a black telephone that looked straight out of the 1940s from behind her back. The force of the phone’s rings made the handset vibrate.
And, then, consciousness seeped in. The phone’s ringing was a digital buzz, not the t-ling t-ling of the old heavy clunkers. My phone. My cordless. In my bedroom, not a Chinese airport.
It had to be Ma, probably drunk again, maybe even in jail. I groped for the phone, dropped it and retrieved it from the jumbled-up covers.
“Hello?” I squinted at the clock.
“Sara? It’s Joe.”
I sat up, pushed a hand through my mussed hair. “What is it? And what happened to the alarm? It’s eight o’clock.”
“I turned it off. You said you weren’t going in this morning. I thought you could do with the extra sleep.”
He sounded a little wounded at my lack of appreciation. “Um, thanks. Did you need something? Forget your lunch? I’ll take it by.”
“No, I just wanted to let you know I could meet you at the doctor’s office. Things here are under control, and the trusses are going up faster—”
