Baltimore, Maryland: April 1, 2004
Donna fidgeted in her chair and glanced down at her watch for what felt like the hundredth time in the past five minutes. Her nerves were shot from anxiety and her mind was as sharp as Play Dough from not getting any sleep the previous night. Her Rolex read 1:19 pm, which meant that he was exactly nineteen minutes late for what could very well be the most important conversation the two of them would ever have. ‘Why am I not surprised?’ she thought bitterly.
She sat alone patiently in a private booth at the trendy Baltimore eatery Morison’s, waiting for Ben to walk in so they could discuss whatever it was he wanted to about Emma. She and Josh had argued to no end about her going alone but she eventually conceded, agreeing Ben would be more likely to respond to Donna without any outside pressure. Little did Donna know but Josh had his own reconnaissance sitting just a few tables away from her for the ease of his own mind. But Donna was too focused on what she was about to do to be too concerned about her husband’s need to have some control over everything.
‘What the hell is taking him so long?’ Donna wondered. She contemplated all the scenarios that could have delayed Ben’s arrival today. Maybe bad traffic or a patient that he needed to consult on or maybe he’d even been hurt in some kind of accident. ‘But you’re not that lucky, sweetie,’ a voice in her head that sounded strangely like Mena’s told Donna. Just as her own thoughts were about to reprimand her grandmother’s mental voice, she heard the sound of her own name being called and she looked up to see him walking right toward her.
‘Well it’s good to know that some things will never change’ she almost said out loud. Ben was still as handsome as ever from what she could see, the Brad Pitt of the obstetrics ward although he looked like he could have been John Cusack’s twin. The raven-colored hair, the eyes, the sharply defined features of a man who knew how good he looked; it was all still there, aged only ever so slightly after six years apart. The only difference was unlike then, Donna now knew there was someone out there even better looking than him and it was her husband. But she wasn’t here to ogle; she was here to ensure her daughter’s future.
Ben reached her table and she stood up as he got there. They both stood there for moment, not speaking, just looking and taking in the other’s appearance. Neither could see any obvious changes to other, except Ben’s notice of Donna’s new wardrobe. Years away from one another gave them a new understanding of the two of them but now was not the time for reflection.
“Hello Donna,” he said softly, breaking the impasse.
“Hi Ben,” she returned. The two of them stood for there for another long moment until Ben finally, awkwardly reached over to kiss her cheek. She gave him a tight smile and motioned for them both to sit down. “So, um,” she fumbled, “how are, uh, things for you?”
“Good, real good. I was working on my residency in Chicago for a while but I just accepted an attending position at Cedar’s Sinai in L.A.,” he replied, looking at her intently.
“Really, that’s great. I’m really happy for you.” The silence reentered the conversation and Donna fiddled with her napkin to give her something to do with herself. “Are you, uh, still…?”
“Donna, let’s not do this right now,” he interrupted her. “We both know why we’re here and it’s not to play catch up.”
“Okay,” she said, putting the napkin down and giving him a fiery glower. “What are we doing here than?”
Ben looked away from her obvious display of anger, his ever-present confidence faltering slightly. “Dee, listen…”
“My name is not Dee,” she whispered heatedly. “Nor is it Baby or Honey or Goldilocks or any of the other hundreds of ridiculous pet names you used to refer to me as. My is Donna and I want to know what the hell we’re doing here right now.”
“Hello, my name is Tiffany and I’ll be you’re server this afternoon,” a chipper voice broke in. Donna looked up to see a perky-looking brunette standing over them, pad in hand, and seemingly unaware that she had intruded on them. “Can I get either of you a drink before you order?”
“Yeah,” Ben answered before Donna could. “I’ll have a seltzer with lime and she’ll have a glass of red wine.” The waitress gave them a curt nod and went to get their drinks.
Donna stared at him, her anger momentarily forgotten. “You remembered?”
“It’s kinda hard to forget when someone orders the exact same drink for almost five years.”
“What about you? If my memory is correct, you were always a gin and tonic man when you weren’t on call.”
“Yeah I gave that up,” he said, going for a menu to decide on his lunch order.
She copied him while giving him a look of disbelief. “Drinking?” He nodded at her. “Ben Peterson gave up casual drinking?”
“Because it started to get a lot less casual after a few years,” Ben clarified, continuing to study the menu.
She averted her eyes. “You’re an alcoholic.”
“If you want to put a label on it, sure why not?” he shrugged as if it didn’t matter, putting down his menu. He looked at her as if he’d just remembered something. “You’re not still breast feeding are you? Because you obviously can’t…”
“No, I stopped that about a month ago,” Donna corrected. “It was just too hard with campaigning and Natalie is fine with the bot…” she trailed off and looked at him suspiciously. “How’d you know I had another baby?”
Ben gave her a grin. “You do realize that you are Madison, Wisconsin’s favorite daughter don’t you? Word gets around fast back there. You’re daughter’s birth announcement even made it into The Observer.”
“I thought you were in Chicago?”
“Well I do have friends Donna. A limited number of them, yes, but still they are my friends.” He reached into his pocket and took out a cigarette and lighter. “Do you mind?”
She held up her hand. “Go ahead. Just remember you’ll be the one I sue when I get lung cancer.”
He smirked at her as he lit the cigarette. “So I heard you were real sick before you had your baby, with, uh, aplastic anemia. You’re okay now?”
“Yeah,” she nodded. “I’m great.”
“You’re getting regular check-ups?”
“Yes.”
“Are you getting bi-annually plasma transfusions? It’s a fairly new treatment for aplastic anemia.”
“My doctor didn’t see the need. My red count has been normal for the past twenty months so…”
“Yeah.” They lapsed back into silence until their waitress returned with their drinks and took their lunch orders. When she left, Donna finally took the initiative.
“Ben why did you call me last week?”
He gazed at her long and hard. “You know why.”
“No, I really don’t,” Donna disagreed. “You could have gone through your lawyer or the court. Why did you have to…?”
“You lied to me about her,” Ben cut off. “You lied to me when you said you gave the baby up for adoption.”
“No I didn’t.”
He chuckled humorlessly. “Your grandmother taking custody with you moving back in with her is not what I’d call giving up your parental rights.”
“You never told me to give up my rights, just my kid,” she said stonily. “Remember Ben? All those nights I pleaded with you to not make me have an abortion, to let me keep my baby? When you finally gave in you just told me you didn’t care what I did, just to give up the kid. I did until we broke up so what is the problem?”
“The problem is you made me a father against my will, Donna. My feelings were completely disregarded…” He noticed her shaking her head and laughing a little. “What the hell is so funny?”
She looked back at him, still laughing quietly. “You honestly think you’re her father? My God, Ben, I remember you being a self-centered asshole but I don’t remember you being this stupid.”
“Excuse me?”
“No excuse me, what gives you the right to call yourself a father? You aren’t there for her everyday since she was born like I’ve been and you certainly haven’t loved her with everything your worth like Josh does. You can call yourself many things Benjamin Christopher Peterson but a father to my oldest daughter is not one of them. You got that?”
“Fine,” he conceded, “but that still doesn’t change the fact that one of us lied to the other about this six years ago.”
“Oh what the hell does it matter now?” Donna asked exasperated. “You didn’t want her and I did. I kept her and I never asked you for anything. Not one goddamn thing and I don’t ever plan to. You are a complete non-entity in her life, she doesn’t even now you exist…”
“Exactly! And that’s how I needed it to be!” he cried, drawing the attention of some of the other patrons. Ben and Donna hung their heads until the attention was off them and by that time their meals had arrived. They cut and chewed their food for a few minutes before Donna picked up where they left off.
“I don’t understand what you meant before.”
He sighed before putting his fork down and biting on his thumbnail, an action that immediately reminded Donna of Emma when she was uncomfortable. “Do you have a picture of her?” he finally asked.
Donna pursed her lips together and closed her eyes before she reached for her pocketbook. She opened it and took out her wallet, rifling through it until she found a recent school picture of Emma. She slowly handed it over to Ben who just stared at it before taking it from her and lifting it to his eyes. Donna watched him study it carefully, a thousand knots twisting inside her stomach as she observed his reactions. Her heart felt like it would hammer out of her chest as she saw his lips quirk upward ever so slightly. After what felt like an eternity, he handed it back to her.
“She looks just like you,” he mumbled softly. “What, uh, is, um uh…” he coughed lightly. “The lawyer didn’t tell me her name when he called and I never…”
“Emma,” she said. “Emma Antonia.”
He nodded, gazing down at the table seemingly lost in his thoughts. “You really should have told me about her,” he said passively after a minute.
“Yeah well there are a lot of things you didn’t tell me either so don’t get all high and mighty on me because you certainly have not earned the right to travel down the moral high road,” Donna shot out, frustrated that she couldn’t seem to get a straight answer out of him.
“You think it’s my fault and mine alone that our relationship was the way it was?” he fired back. “You knew who I was coming into it. I told you right off the bat that I couldn’t handle monogamy at that time and you said, and I quote, ‘I can live with that’. Least I was honest about it. You on the other hand, you were completely unfair to me about it from the get go.”
“Me coming home and finding you fucking some med student in our bed was honesty?” she demanded, the humiliation of it still stinging after all these years. “How was that fair to me Ben?”
“Well how fair was it was that in order for me to be with you, I had to be with your entire family at the same time?” he wanted to know.
Donna was near tears as she shook her head vehemently. “You sonofabitch. How dare you…?”
“Be truthful with you?” Ben taunted crossly. “Face it Donnatella, you needed them to support you emotionally or you would have fallen apart and you know it. If you knew you couldn’t handle it, then why did you try to in the first place?”
Donna was about to respond when a cry of pain startled her. She turned swiftly to the sound and was shocked at what she saw. “Ellie?”
The redheaded young woman turned around to the sound of her sister-in-law’s voice. “Donna,” she moaned loudly, clutching her pregnant stomach in her hands as she stood.
“Oh my god,” Donna whispered excitedly as she rushed over to where Ellie was standing, panting in pain. “Ellie, this is it!”
“No shit Sherlock!” she cried as the full weight of the contraction set in, oblivious to the eyes that stared at her. Donna rubbed her back gently as Ellie gritted her eyes against the pain. “Oh this is too soon,” she sighed as the pain began to ebb away. “It’s too soon and the nursery isn’t ready yet and T.J. isn’t here!”
“Where the hell is he?”
“He went out hunting with some friends. We thought…thought that there was time but…” Her face contorted in agony. “Oh God, someone help me!” Donna looked around dumbly for someone, anyone to help her sister-in-law.
Suddenly, Ben appeared at their sides, his hands wet as if he’d just washed them somewhere. “Okay Ellie, my name is Dr. Peterson and I’m going get you settled until we can get an ambulance out here,” he said calmly, placing his hand on her stomach to feel the contraction. His brow furrowed as he timed the length of it on his watch and he looked up at them when the worst was over. “Ellie we need to get you some privacy now okay?” He turned over to the manager, who had entered upon hearing of the commotion with a first aid kit in his hands. “Is there a back room here that we can use?”
“Of course, you can use our private dining room,” the manger hurriedly agreed, leading the trio slowly through the gawking crowd into the secluded back room. When they got there, Ben instructed Ellie to lie down and the manager to give him the kit and call for an ambulance.
“Tell them we have a woman in active labor, that the baby will probably be born before they get here, and that there’s a competent physician present to handle any emergencies,” he rattled off to the manager as he put on a pair of latex gloves, who rushed to oblige him. “How far along are you Ellie?”
“ She’s eight and a half months pregnant. What do you mean the baby will born by the time they get here?” Donna whispered nervously, squeezing Ellie’s hand as another contraction racked through her body.
Ben ignored Donna and instead placed a hand between Ellie’s spread legs and froze his eyes ahead in concentration. He chewed his lip before he looked back at her. “Ellie,” he said gently to the young woman. “Ellie listen to me.” She turned her glazed eyes toward his warm blue ones. “I know you’re in a lot of pain right now but you have to listen to me. You’re fully dilated right now so that means your baby is gong to be born very soon. I know that’s very scary for you but you need to work with me so everything will go okay. All right? Can you do that for me?” Ellie nodded fearfully. “That’s great. Okay when your next contraction sets in, I want you to push down as hard as you can for a count of ten okay?” Ellie nodded again and no more than a second later, her eyes began widening as the contraction came. Donna helped her lean up and Ellie began pushing as Ben counted off.
“Okay 1, 2, 3, 4, 5…” Ben’s voice disappeared as Ellie’s screams began to drown him out. She clutched Donna’s hand as if her life depended on it and Donna did her best not to scream herself at the pain Ellie was causing her.
“Oh fuck! I need drugs right now!” Ellie shouted as she stopped pushing and gulped in air.
“A bit late for that I’m afraid,” Ben said as he quickly ripped off his jacket. “Come on, you can do this. Woman were doing this for centuries before modern medicine came along.”
“Yeah well when you are the one squeezing something the size of a Cadillac out of an opening the size of a keyhole you can lecture me! Until then, just get this baby out of me you bastard! Oh sweet Jesus, here comes another one.”
“All right now give me a good, hard push Ellie,” Ben coached from his position. For the next ten minutes, it went on like that, with Ellie pushing and Ben and Donna encouraging her. Finally Ben could see a tiny head start to come out of Ellie’s body. “Donna, come see this.”
Donna peered over Ellie’s legs to see a pair of brown eyes stare blindly at her. “Oh Ellie, I can see the head!” she cried eagerly.
“You can? Ellie whispered tiredly but happily. “Does it look okay? Who does it look like, me or T.J.?”
“Right now it just looks like a gray blob covered in Jell-O so why don’t we give it one more good push so we can meet the rest of this kid?” Ben asked with a smile.
“Who the hell is this we that you speak…Oh shhhiiittt!” Ellie bellowed as the baby that had grown inside of her for nearly nine months was finally freed. They all paused fearfully until a pitiful wail penetrated their ears. “Oh my god,” Ellie cried as joyful tears streamed down her face. “What…what is it?”
Ben quickly tied up the umbilical cord and cut it with a pair of hospital scissors from the kit. He looked around for a second before he placed the squalling newborn in his jacket and wrapped it up tight. He ever so carefully handed the child to its mother before he smiled gently. “Say hello to your son, Ellie.”
“Oh he’s so adorable,” Donna gushed as she looked down at her nephew, memories of Emma and Natalie’s births flashing in her mind.
“Is he okay?” Ellie asked her gaze transfixed on the baby.
“He seems to be,” Ben surmised, cleaning up the mess around. “We need to get you both to a hospital to get you checked out but you two seem golden to me.” He peeled of his gloves and stretched his arms above his head. “Does he have a name yet?”
“Shawn,” Ellie answered as the baby sucked on one of her fingertips. “Shawn Barrington Bartlet-Moss.”
“I would have assumed T.J. would have insisted on a namesake.”
“He tried but I said I wouldn’t force Tomasso on my worst enemy,” Ellie laughed as she took in her son’s face. Donna and Ben smiled at the pair and when they looked up, they accidentally met each other’s sight as they both thought back to another birth that they had shared together more than six years ago.
An hour later, Ellie was settled into her room at Wellington General Hospital. Shawn was getting his standard testing performed and Donna was waiting with Ellie in her room. Most of the family had been called and T.J. was rushing through traffic, breaking every speeding law known to man if Donna knew her little brother.
“He’s so beautiful,” Donna said for what felt like the hundredth time. “Who do you think he looks like? I didn’t see a lot of T.J. in him.”
“Like my mom,” Ellie said wistfully, tears welling her eyes as she thought of the late Abbey Bartlet. “That’s what we were going to name him if he was girl. We agreed on Barrington for a middle name if he was boy and…”
“It’s okay,” Donna patted her hand. “I know.” And she did know the pain of not having the woman who brought you into life present as you were doing the same. It was something she knew instinctively that Ellie would never get over, no matter how many children she had. “So,” she tried to distract her, “what on earth were you doing at the restaurant anyways? I thought your doctor told you not to travel that much this late in the pregnancy.”
“Oh,” Ellie hung her head sheepishly. “I was kind of doing someone a favor.”
“Who?”
“I was doing it for Josh,” she said quietly.
“For Josh? What were you doing for…?” The pieces fell into place in Donna’s head. “You were spying on me weren’t you?” Her sister-in-law nodded slowly. “He wants to know what Ben and I discussed and he was afraid I wouldn’t mention everything right?”
“Pretty much,” Ellie said as she looked out the window on the door of her room where she could make out Ben conferring with her doctor in the hallway. “He seems like a halfway decent guy, compared to what I heard about him.”
“He can be,” Donna admitted. “I guess that’s what made it so hard to leave him in the first place.” She could see him turning away and going down the hallway. “You gonna be okay?” she asked Ellie as she got up. Ellie nodded and Donna leaned down to give her a kiss on the cheek. “Congratulations. I’ll call later when I get back tonight.” With that, she left the room and hurried down the hallway to catch up with Ben. She saw a pair of elevator doors close ahead of her and she feared that she’d missed him but as she looked around she found him. He was standing in front of the nursery window, peering in at the little faces behind it. Gathering up her composure, Donna walked over to him and placed a hand on his shoulder.
“As much as I loved you when we were together,” Ben began slowly, not looking at her. “A part of me hated you too. You had this amazing family that you could go to for everything and I guess I always knew deep down that you’d never need me as much as you needed them. It made it easier in some ways to be unfaithful to you.”
Donna took in his admission and decided to give him back one of her own. “I thought I could change you,” she replied. “That’s why I stayed with you as long as I did. Maybe it was even why I chose you in the first place so I could achieve this impossible goal that no one said I could. It’s also why I tried to go back after Emma was born and when I first joined the campaign.” She sighed thoughtfully. “We were doomed from the start though. Everything and everyone was working against us.”
“It probably would have been better if we’d never done it in the first place,” Ben said, still looking at the newborns in front of him. “But then if we hadn’t, she never would have been born.” Donna saw him smile to himself. “I remember being with you when she was born. I remember thinking that you looked so beautiful even when you were sweating and screaming like that.” He paused to swallow. “I remember her. I remember looking at her and smiling when I saw her, at how perfect she looked. I also remember as soon as I saw her that I knew I couldn’t keep her.”
“Why?” Donna asked quietly, finally voicing the question she’d asked herself for so many years. “Why didn’t you want her?”
“I wanted her more than I’ve ever wanted anything,” Ben corrected. He finally turned his face to hers. “But I didn’t have what you had. You had this amazing family to help you and this remarkable patience and this instinct that’d you’d be a good mother. I didn’t have any of that. I couldn’t be her father then.”
“And now?” Donna asked bracing herself for bad news.
Ben looked back at the babies for an instant and than reached down for his briefcase. He pulled out a series of legal documents and handed them to Donna. “Here are the papers you wanted me to sign,” he said quietly. “The adoption should go through in the next month if I understood the language in them correctly.
Donna took the papers he held out to her and let out a breath she hadn’t known she’d been holding. “I…I still don’t understand,” she asked shakily. “I thought…from how you talked you sound like…”
“I’m engaged,” he said, shocking her even more. He laughed at the face she’d made. “What, it’s that impossible?”
“No,” Donna recovered. “That’s…that’s great. I’m happy for you. So did you request her to get a CAT scan before or after you proposed?”
“I took her right down to radiology after she said yes,” Ben joked with her. “But seriously, she’s a great woman. A doctor in pediatrics and she agreed to move to L.A. with me. And we’re having a baby so…”
Donna nodded carefully. “Does she not know about Emma?”
“No I told her. I figured if this was going to be the first successful relationship of my life, I might as well try honesty for a change.”
“What’d you tell her?”
“What I’m about to tell you,” he said. “I was a selfish, irresponsible, borderline alcoholic with commitment issues and an anger problem. Now, I’m a selfish, irresponsible, recovering alcoholic with commit issues and a therapist.” She rolled her eyes at him. “Seriously though, when she told me she was pregnant, I went straight for the nearest bar and camped there for the weekend. I didn’t touch any booze though just thought about a lot of things. Mostly about you and Emma though since the lawyer had just called me. And I came to a conclusion about all three of us.”
“And that was…?”
“It was easy to leave her the first time because I didn’t love the two of you the way I should have if we were going to be a family,” he elaborated. “And now, you’ve rightly moved on with her and she has a father. A father that she deserves by all accounts and I don’t have a right to screw with that. So I’m going have to leave her again a second time and we’ll just pretend that I don’t exist for her. I’ll just be this looming nightmare that finally goes away for you I guess.”
“Well that’s fine with me for now,” Donna agreed. “But what about ten years from now, when she starts asking about her birth father? And I know that she will. What do I tell her then?”
Ben shrugged. “Just make her hate me so much that she won’t want anything to do with me. You and your family are pretty good at that.”
She chose to ignore his dig. “How is that fair to her? She deserves to know where she comes from.”
“What do you want me to do Donna?” he asked annoyed. “You want me to change who I am and what I feel for something that might not even happen years from now? I can’t change how I feel about this. Trust me, this is the easiest thing for everybody.”
“And by everybody, you mean yourself of course.”
He held up his hands in a motion of truce. “Can we not do this again? I’ve made up my mind and you can’t change it so just don’t even try.” He leaned down to gather his ruined suit coat and briefcase. He bent down to kiss her lightly on the cheek. “Take care of yourself, Donna.” He turned away from her and started back down the hallway.
“Wait,” Donna called after a minute. She caught up to him and handed him something from her purse. “Take this with you.” She handed him the picture of Emma that she’d shown him in the restaurant.
“Donna please…”
“Just take it,” she insisted. “I mean, you never know.”
He looked down at it carefully before taking it and tucking it into his shirt pocket. They stood there together, in the middle of a busy hospital. “See you around,” he said noncommittally.
“Yeah,” she agreed. Ben finally turned away from her and walked down the hallway and out of her life yet again, maybe for the last time. She sniffled and wiped away at the tears she didn’t even now had been running down her cheeks. Ben Peterson may not have been the great love of her life but he’d been the first and to finally let go of him after more than ten years hurt.
Donna walked down the same hallway, not trying to catch up with Ben but to get out of the hospital. She exited the building and hailed a cab, telling the driver to take her to the train station. She’d catch the five o’clock train to Hartford and hopefully be home in time for dinner.
They arrived at the station a few minutes later and Donna paid the fare and went to go buy a ticket. To take her mind off of things while she waited for the train, she pulled her cell phone out of her bag and dialed home.
“Hello?” Emma’s voice answered her after a few rings.
“Hi sweetie, it’s Mommy,” she said with a smile. “How was your day?”
Donna could practically feel her daughter smiling on the other end. “It was great. I went to a speech with Daddy and then he took me for lunch in a grown-up restaurant all by myself. And there were candles and flowers and he let me eat a big piece of chocolate cake all by myself!”
“Well I’m so jealous of you now I could just pull all my hair out!”
“Don’t do that, Mommy,” Emma giggled. “Then you’d be all bald and grumpy like Toby is.” Donna let out a great laugh at that and added it to the mental list of cute things her daughter said to tell everyone she knew. “What did you do today Mommy?”
“Um, I had lunch with someone today too, sweetie.”
“With who?”
“An old friend of Mommy’s from a long time ago.”
“Do I know them?”
Donna closed her eyes at Emma’s innocent comment. ‘More than you know, baby,’ her mind answered. “No you don’t know them honey,” she said instead. “But guess what else happened? Aunt Ellie had her baby today. You have a cousin.”
“Really? I do?” Emma squealed eagerly. “Is it a boy or a girl?”
“A little boy named Shawn and I promise we’ll go see them real soon.”
“Good.” Emma paused for a second. “Mommy where do babies come from?”
Donna almost dropped the phone at that question and hastily searched her mind for an appropriate answer. Suddenly, an evil smile crossed her face. “Emma when Daddy comes home tonight, why don’t you ask him and see what he says? Okay?” She could hear the whistle of the train approach and she got up to board it.
“Okay.”
“That’s my girl. So who’s watching you right now?”
“Grandma Rachel is but she had to go and mail a letter real quick. She’ll be right back though. And Daddy’s working with Toby and Aunt Nicole’s going to take you and me and Grandma and Natty out for dinner tonight.”
“Well that sounds like a lot of fun.”
“Good. When are you coming home?”
“I’m on my way home right now. In fact I need to get off the phone soon so I can get onto the train.”
“Extra good. I love you Mommy.”
“I love you too, baby.” She swallowed back a few tears. “I’m giving you and your sister imaginary kisses right now. Can you feel them?”
“Yep. They’re all on my nose and neck and my forehead…” Donna listened with a smile as she stepped onboard the train and settled into her seat.
“That’s right, you are so smart Emma. Can you do Mommy a favor? Can you give Natalie lots of real kisses for me?”
“Yep, she’s right here with me and Lulu.” Emma pulled the phone away and Donna could hear the smacking sounds Emma made when she kissed someone and Natalie’s giggles in the background. “We’ll see you really real soon.”
“You bet you will.” The connection on the phone started to weaken. “I have to go now. I love you Emma.”
“I love you too Mommy. Bye-bye.”
“Bye-bye.” Donna snapped her phone shut and leaned back in her seat, gazing out at the spring landscape of Baltimore as she headed home, her daughter’s future with her and Josh finally secure.