That Night We Made Baby. Mary Wilson Anne

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      “Wonderful. Tea and conversation, the two things I’ve missed so much until you rented the cottage.”

      Mrs. Douglas was tiny and spry with silver hair and the propensity for anything lavender, even in her gardens that hugged the top of the cliff overlooking the beach. “Yes, I’ll look forward to that.” She was about to say goodbye when Mrs. Douglas spoke again.

      “Oh, my, I almost forgot why I called. I was at the cottage watering your plants, and the phone rang. I know it could have gone to your machine, but that’s so impersonal, so I hope it’s okay that I took the call?”

      “Of course it is. Was it important?”

      “Just a minute,” she said, then Sam heard the rustle of paper before Mrs. Douglas spoke again. “Let me see if I can read my own handwriting here. Yes, it was a Mr. Danforth’s secretary calling to let you know that the final divorce papers are ready for your signature and he wants you to contact him at your earliest convenience.”

      Sam sank onto the bed, her legs suddenly unsteady. The divorce. Why had she thought she could come to Los Angeles without being touched by Nick in one way or another? “Anything else?”

      “No, not really. Except you told me you were only married for three months. I would have thought you could just have gotten an annulment instead of a divorce. I mean, after three months, that’s hardly a marriage.”

      The elderly lady was more right than she knew about her marriage hardly being a marriage. “Nick took care of it, and I told him to do whatever he needed. He’s an attorney, so I assumed he’d know how best to handle the situation.”

      Sam closed her eyes but opened them immediately when a vision of Nick popped into her head. Damn it, she’d been trying to put him behind her for six months. She’d changed her life by putting almost the entire state of California between them and rebuilding her own life. But suddenly he was there, tall and lean, his face a mix of planes and angles, eyes so intense she’d been sure he could see into her soul.

      One of the many things she’d been wrong about with Nick was that he hadn’t been able to see into her soul. He’d never even known her. He’d wanted to be with her but had never wanted the marriage she’d finally insisted on. Just a few of the many things she’d found out about too late. She shook her head and banished the thoughts and memories.

      “There’s no point in looking back,” she said. Especially not when all that did was stir up a sense of loss and frustration and pain. A sense of being so wrong.

      “You’re right, Samantha. The future is where your life is going. You’re young and have your whole life ahead of you. And you know, dear, you can never go back.”

      She wouldn’t want to. “Thanks for the message, Mrs. Douglas. I’ll see you tomorrow.”

      “Have a safe trip, dear, and come by the house to let me know when you’re home.”

      “Yes, I will,” she said, and hung up.

      The divorce was a formality. A legality. Nothing more. But that logic couldn’t shut out memories of that horrible conversation she’d overheard the night her marriage had ended. Nick and his partner and friend, Greg O’Neill, had been out on the deck of the house in Malibu, drinking in the darkness. She’d heard their loud conversation all the way from the living room.

      “My God, Greg,” she’d heard Nick say, “I’ve gotten myself in a real mess. This marriage…” She’d heard the clink of glass on glass and looked through the doorway out to the deck. She’d barely been able to make Nick out as he stood with his back to the house, staring at the ocean. “I don’t even know how it happened,” he’d said to Greg. “I’d only known her two weeks.” She tried to stop the memory but it kept going.

      “You bribed a judge, didn’t you?” Greg had replied with a burst of laughter. She’d stopped a few feet from the door and waited for Nick to join in, to make it all a joke.

      But that hadn’t happened. “‘Bribe’ isn’t the word, but he owed me a favor. If I’d had to wait three days, who knows?”

      “You wouldn’t have done it?” Greg had asked.

      “I would have come to my senses,” he’d said after a long, painful pause. That had been the truth. She’d heard it in his voice. There was a blur of hurtful words, then Nick saying, “Marriage isn’t a normal state. Who ever thought up this concept of ‘forever’ with one person?”

      Sam had known things were bad between them, that they were strangers in so many ways. As much as she’d craved a family, a connection that she’d never had from her life growing up in foster homes, she’d known at that moment that happily-ever-after was never going to happen with Nick.

      Pain and sorrow had filled her and she’d known what she had to do then. As she knew what she had to do now. Once she signed the divorce papers, she could go back to her real life and start forgetting Nick…again.

      Chapter Two

      Late that afternoon, when Nick got to Danforth’s plush offices he was beyond sick. He had aches where he’d never felt aches before, and there was an unwelcome sense of his world not being right. He had to make a conscious effort to walk into the beige-on-beige reception area and get the day over with.

      A simple nod to the receptionist who sat behind an intricate marble desk cost him dearly when a throbbing headache materialized behind his eyes. He grimaced. “Marge. I just need a minute of his time,” he said.

      “I’m not sure he’s free to—”

      “I won’t take a minute,” he said as he kept going, unnerved by a wave of weakness that washed over him.

      God, he hated weakness of all kinds, especially in himself. He dealt with it all too often with his clients, and the only concession he’d made to being sick today was to take his medication.

      But the medicine was hardly helping at all. And it hadn’t helped earlier when he’d had three cases on the docket and had to deal with one client who had been a no-show at a bail hearing. And he’d been trying to figure out for the past hour why a case he should have been able to plea-bargain had gone to trial. Now he had to sign the divorce papers.

      He rapped on the door and flinched slightly from the headache that had just kicked up a notch and from Danforth’s booming greeting as the man opened the door. Danforth looked a little surprised to see him.

      “Wasn’t expecting you,” he said in a baritone that served the man well in court but seemed brutally loud at that moment. “You never called back so I didn’t know if you’d picked up the message.” He moved back a bit. “But come on in.”

      “I got your message first thing this morning,” Nick muttered as he entered the office. “So I came by after—”

      His words stopped dead as the dream from the night before materialized not more than ten feet from him. A couple of long strides and he could have touched Sam, a Sam in a clinging blue sundress. Her blond curls had been all but banished by a short wedge cut that made her face all the more delicate-looking and her eyes all the more green.

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