“Probably, but we were young. We had so many goals.” She shrugged. “Neither one of us wanted a child then.”
“But you planned to have one later.” He was trying to understand. He really was.
“By the time I was forty.”
“You never mentioned it because you weren’t planning to stay married to me?” He supposed the question was a bit ludicrous considering that they weren’t married, but had she gone into the marriage knowing it wouldn’t last?
“I just figured that once we’d both done what we had to do, reached our career goals, we’d be ready to talk about having a family.”
He nodded. At least she hadn’t been planning their divorce before she’d even married him. And they’d never actually said they were never going to have children. He’d just assumed, since she was as career-driven as he was—since she put job above all else and completely accepted the fact that he did, too—he’d just assumed she didn’t want a family as much as he didn’t want one.
Maybe he knew her better than she knew herself.
Sitting down beside her, Michael once again took her in his arms. Having her there with him was the only thing that felt right, natural... normal.
“Susan, honey, you’re at a particularly vulnerable time in your life. A time when people make rash decisions. And then spend the next twenty years regretting them.”
“Don’t patronize me, Michael.” She pulled away from him, one-hundred percent intimidating attorney, even while wearing nothing more than his shirt. “I am not going through a midlife crisis.”
“It’s perfectly natural.”
“And I’m not going through one.”
“Most people don’t realize that they are.”
“And do they start them in their twenties?”
“You can’t honestly consider some half-baked thought you once had about having a child as proof that you really wanted it. If you did, why’d you wait so long?”
“Because I knew I could afford to wait. That I needed to wait.” Her eyes pleaded with him to take her seriously. “The thought, even back then, wasn’t half-baked.”
“How can you be so sure about a decision like this?”
“Remember when I went to Kentucky that weekend before we got married?”
“Of course.” He’d been scared to death she was going to change her mind.
“I went because I was having second thoughts. I was afraid that by marrying you, I was going to lose me.”
“You never told me that.” Michael pulled at a string coming loose from the button at the bottom of his shirt.
“I know.” She smiled sadly. “You’d just have told me you wouldn’t let that happen, that you wouldn’t take away who I was or needed to be.”
“Because it’s true.”
“But sometimes these things happen to people without their even noticing it.” She took his hand, held it in her lap. “You wouldn’t knowingly or purposely have distracted me from my goals, Michael. Just my loving you, wanting to make you happy might have done that.” She paused, then began again, her voice low. “Once you start...subjugating yourself, you don’t even know anymore whose interests you’re really protecting. And then you’re fifty or sixty years old and resenting everyone because you haven’t done what you needed to do in life and it’s too late. Look what happened to my mother. Because of our family.”
And suddenly Michael began to understand. He’d been the one to pick up the pieces of Susan’s tortured heart after Rose Carmichael died. They hadn’t been married yet, but he’d helped her come to grips with that last, painful conversation. Helped her work through the regrets, the recriminations.
“I wrote out a life plan that weekend in Kentucky, Michael. My goals, my dreams. And target dates by which I either had to decide they no longer mattered—or I had to fulfill them.”
Michael started to feel a little sick. “Having a baby was on that list.”
Susan nodded.
“And it still matters.”
“Yes.”