Perhaps it was because she found herself with some free time that morning, or maybe it was eagerness to bring a new child into her home, but Charlotte found herself arriving at the offices of adoption attorney over half an-hour early. She settled down in a chair and the reception area and let her mind wander. She thought about the events of the last few weeks, and about Trey's request.
"Aren't you a pretty one," the woman cooed as she peered into Mai's carriage.
Charlotte was startled into attention. She hadn't even noticed the woman who had sat beside her.
She turned to address Charlotte. "She's such a pretty little girl. How old is she?"
"She just turned two a few weeks ago," Charlotte replied absently.
"Oh, how lucky you are. My Jim and I have been trying to have a baby since we got married nearly ten years ago. When we found out we couldn't have our own, we got on all the lists. That was a little over five years ago now."
Suddenly Charlotte felt her heart go out to the woman. "That must be agony," she sympathized.
"Well, yeah, it was. But we have our baby now, thanks to lawyer Stone. He'll be born at the end of this month, right in Queens, not a mile from where we live."
As out of character as it was for her to share personal information with a stranger, Charlotte felt the need to share a bit of her own story with the woman. "We adopted Mai from China about a year ago. She's been such a joy."
"We wanted to do an overseas adoption. We just couldn't afford it. It's bad enough all the fees to adopt an American baby. We just couldn't afford to travel to a foreign country and back several times and have a lawyer to fill out all the extra paper work. We had to take money from Jim's parents as it is. It just seems wrong, if you ask me, children in those orphanages without anyone to pay any attention to them, when there are couples like Jim and me who could give them a good home here."
Carrie found slip of paper with Berger's number on it. And she decided to take the best revenge – living happily. She went out onto the balcony of her new home. She took the piece of paper, tore it into eight little pieces and let a breeze blow them from her hand.
That evening, Charlotte was thinking about Mai, about how sweet the little girl was, how much joy she had brought into her life and Harry's. She also though about Bunny MacDougal's hateful attitude when Charlotte had wanted to adopt a baby with Trey. She sang Mai a lullaby and put her to bed. Then she went into the living room and dialed Trey's number.
Six months later, Charlotte cut the ribbon for the Margaret Hayes MacDougal Center for International Adoption, a charity underwritten by the MacDougal Charitable Foundation to help couples defray the cost of adoptions. She smile and thought, "It's never too late to do the right thing. Even when you're dead."