A/N: thanks as always to Jan, Barbara, and Alison.

Chapter 11

early February 2013

On Saturday, Richard called just before noon. He had come to the city on some constituent business Friday and decided to stay overnight to see his parents. He asked if he could come over, because he had something he needed to talk to Will about. Of course Will agreed.

What Richard wanted to tell them was that he'd heard from Georgie again. She had called that morning. "She says she's ready for rehab," Richard reported, his voice full of skepticism.

Will's eyebrows shot up. "Really." This was the first time since she had failed out of college in her freshman year that she'd indicated any willingness to give it another try. "What's going on? Did she say?" She had raised their hopes so many times before, only to dash them, hard. It was impossible to believe anything she had to say.

"Not exactly. She says she met someone, a man..."

"Oh, of course she did—"

Richard threw his hands up in the air. "I don't know. Maybe it's different this time." There had been other men, other boys, who she had wanted to clean up for in the past, when she was younger. She was 29 now.

"Anyway, she wants to try Tranquility, that place in Connecticut, and she also wants to visit you and Lizzy, if you'll see her." Tranquility was where Will had gotten help for Lizzy's sister Lydia all those years ago

"Have you seen her since last time?"

"No, no. But I told her I'd see her later this afternoon, before I head back to Washington tonight. Do you want to come?"

"Oh, God. I don't know."

"It's OK. I'll take care of it this time, see if she's serious."

Will sighed. "All right. I'll call the experts on Monday." That meant the lawyers and the counselors.

Richard stayed for lunch, Chinese delivered from his favorite place, and then headed out to see Georgie.

After he left, Lizzy cleared off the table in the breakfast nook where they'd eaten, while Will held a lightly dozing Emma.

As she carried the dishes into the kitchen, Lizzy asked,"What do you think? Are you going to see her?"

Will sighed heavily. He had been doing that a lot ever since Richard had showed up. "I don't know. How many times am I going to let her put me through this? On the other hand, what if she really means it this time?"

"Look, sweetie, you're the one with the experience dealing with this. I'll support you whatever you decide." She put the bowls on the top rack of the dishwasher and closed it back up again.

Will heaved yet another sigh. "It's been ten years since she showed any interest at all in rehab. Maybe it's time to give it another try. Maybe she's really ready this time. I don't know."

Lizzy put her arms lightly around Will, Emma cradled in Will's arms between them. They both gazed down at her, watching her sleep. Her plump, soft baby mouth was open slightly and her long eyelashes nestled on the tops of her round baby cheeks. She looked like a little angel. Too bad she didn't sleep angelically more often. "Let's see what Richard has to say after they meet. Maybe we'll have a better sense of what's going on." She shepherded him into the living room, and they sat down on the sofa, snuggling close and looking at Emma some more.

"God, I don't want to go through this again," he choked out, pained.

"I know, sweetheart. I'm sorry." Lizzy put her head on Will's shoulder, stroking his arm. They sat silently for a long time. Lizzy curled up against his side, and putting her arms around her two most beloved people in the whole universe. She wished she could protect them from all the painful things out there in this cold, hard world.

Richard called early that evening from La Guardia. Georgie seemed serious about rehab, he said. "But what do I know?" he added. He gave Will Georgie's phone number. For the rest of the evening, Will and Lizzy took turns holding Emma as they talked for a long time about whether they should let Georgie into their lives at all, even a little bit, and if so, how.

On Monday, Will did call the experts while he was at work. Because all along they had made Georgie's entering rehab a condition of any other kinds of engagement, they agreed that giving it a try was probably the right thing to do. They worked up a proposal for the terms under which the family trust would pay for Georgie's rehab.

That evening over dinner at home, Will said, "So, I'm going to give her a call. Offer to meet." Lizzy hadn't seen his affect so flat for a long, long time. Maybe not since when he had talked to Georgie for the first time in front of her.

"OK. Does it feel like the right thing to do?" she asked.

"Yeah. Even if it turns out that she just burns me again, I think I'll feel better if I give her a chance."

"Do you want me there? Do you want to meet her here?"

"Not this time, I think."

She considered this for a moment. "Is a neutral place better, is that what you're thinking?"

"Yeah. I also don't feel like taking the time to lock up all the prescription medicine, alcohol, jewelry, art, and anything else that someone might sell for drug money." His mouth twisted into an unhappy grimace.

"Oh." Lizzy had had no idea that things had been that bad with Georgie, but now that he said it, it seemed obvious. She took his hand. "Right. Of course. Sorry."

He glumly shook his head. "No, it's all right."

Emma squawked in her highchair, and Will stopped eating to take her out and hold her in his lap. He fed her mashed bananas while holding her in his arms.

That week, on Wednesday night, for the first time ever, Emma slept through the night. That was pediatrician-speak for sleeping for five consecutive hours. Actually it was more like four hours and 40 minutes, but Lizzy was willing to call it five. Of course on Thursday Emma woke up what seemed like every twenty seconds all night long, just to make up for it.

Lizzy was a basket case on Friday morning from lack of sleep, and Emma was fussy, fussy, fussy. She was drooling like crazy and kept chewing on everything. When Elena arrived after lunch, Lizzy told her about it. Elena said, "Oh, well, that sounds like she's teething. Did you check out her gums?"

Sure enough, there in the front of her lower gums, they could see a little tooth straining to break through. Lizzy was so excited that she called Will to show him the news on FaceTime, but all he could see was drool.

Will met with Georgie later that afternoon at the Starbucks near WPD's offices. That night he told Lizzy about the visit while they were relaxing in the living room and playing with Emma on the floor.

"She looked really bad. Really bad. So skinny..." His voice was full of misery and what Lizzy thought sounded like regret.

"Oh, sweetheart. I'm so sorry." Lizzy put her hand on his shoulder.

"I'm still not really sure what, you know, precipitated all of this. I think I told you, she met a man when she was staying at the Winthrops' place in the Hamptons, a friend of theirs. She says they're in love. He OD'd, sort of hit bottom, I guess, and now they want to get straightened out together. I don't know."

"What did you tell her?"

He heaved yet another huge sigh. "I said that if she wanted to go into rehab, then the family trust would pay for it, under a lot of conditions. And if she doesn't meet the conditions, then the money stops."

Lizzy winced. "Ouch. What did she say to that?"

Will shrugged, "She said, 'I guess I deserve that.'"

"Huh. That's interesting."

"What do you mean?"

"Nothing, really. It just shows some level of self-awareness, that's all."

Will grimaced. "She's never been stupid or unaware. That's part of the problem, actually. She can run circles around the rest of us, always could."

"Hmmph. So, did you agree on Tranquility?"

"Yeah. We can get her in there in two or three weeks."

"No extra outlays this time to get her in sooner?" Lizzy asked, not so obliquely referring to how Will had gotten her own sister Lydia admitted on very short notice.

Will shook his head and said, a little dejected, "No. She'll just have to wait till a former child star leaves, same as everyone else."

He paused. "If it goes OK, then I'm going to have to take some trips to Connecticut to do the family therapy thing."

Lizzy took his hand. "Yeah, I know. Don't worry. I have things covered here."

A room opened up at Tranquility a little sooner than expected, and by the third week in February, Georgie had been admitted. Saturday afternoon, Will drove to Connecticut to attend family therapy with her. That evening, he came home looking pretty rough. He kicked off his shoes, flopped down and stretched out on the sofa with his arm over his eyes.

"God, therapy sucks," was all he would say. He told Lizzy he needed to process it all before he was ready to talk about it. She perched on the edge of the sofa next to him and put Emma on his chest. He held on tight, his face closed, rubbing Emma's back. Some light finally came back into his eyes when she held her wobbly head up high to look around and then drooled excessively all over his shirtfront. Lizzy observed and wiped up, but she didn't press him to talk right then.

The next day, Lizzy, Will and Emma met Charlotte, Liam, and Chloe for bagels at the old friends' standby deli. Things were still a little strained between Lizzy and Charlotte, but it was good to get together anyway, to move on from their New Years Eve disagreement. Chloe had an afternoon playdate with a friend and Charlotte had some work to do, so before too long their family had headed off.

The Darcy-Bennet family set off for Central Park. It was a clear, chilly day, and an occasional gust of wind blew leaves and litter into little funnel clouds near the benches and trash cans scattered along the sidewalk. The trees were still bare and gray, and it felt like spring was not going to come this year, ever

Emma was strapped to Will's chest, facing out and taking in the whole world. Whenever she saw something interesting, she kicked her legs out and stuck her arms up and squealed, over and over. Beside them, Lizzy pushed the stroller, the diaper bag strapped in like a phantom baby as usual.

A pair of women, one middle-aged and the younger one quite evidently her daughter, started making eyes at Emma as they approached on the sidewalk.

"Oh, she's so cute!"

"What a sweetie pie!"

"Oh, and she loves her daddy!"

"Yes, how great that your daddy carries you around! So cute!"

Lizzy smiled and stood there, invisible, in the face of a daddy who spent the afternoon with his baby. Of course the women wouldn't have been nearly so interested if Lizzy had been carrying Emma. Finally the women moved off, having exhausted their daily supply of goo-goo and ga-ga.

Lizzy and Will strolled along. She asked him, "There's something I've been thinking about, and I hope it's not too soon after your session yesterday to ask you. Do you remember that a long time ago, you told me you thought Georgie's troubles happened because she didn't have anything meaningful to do with her life? No work?"

"Yeah, sure." How could they forget? He'd written that to her in the long email he'd sent her after the breakup that had ended the first disastrous part of their relationship.

"Do you think that's true, still?"

Some teenagers were playing Frisbee out on the grass, the wind playing havoc with their game. Next to them, a kid and her father were attempting to fly a kite, but not having much luck.

"Maybe a little. But like you said, there's a lot more to it than that. From some things she said yesterday, it sounds like a big part of what she's struggling with is feelings of abandonment. You know, Mom and Dad died, I went off to school when she was really little, Mrs. Martinez started living out when she started elementary school..."

"Oh, that's rough. I'm sorry."

"Actually, she thinks I abandoned her, again, later on."

"What?! You did everything for her."

"No, that's what she said. I abandoned her after our parents died, by leaving her at Deerfield, and then by sending her off to Harvard and then to rehab after she got kicked out of school. Shoving her off on somebody else instead of doing anything myself."

"She thinks that sending her to Harvard and rehab was abandonment? OK, now she's just jerking you around. That's total crap."

"Yeah, I know. But that's how her mind works. She's really messed up. Still, I do think there's something to the first part of it. Mom and Dad really weren't there for her."

"Did you feel that way, too?"

"Yeah, some. They were always busy with this and that. I think I told you before, a lot of times I only saw Dad when he said good night. Mom, too, sometimes. But I didn't take drugs or drink too much, if that's what you're thinking."

"No, I know. Everybody reacts to these things in different ways. Just look at me and my sisters."

"True." He thought about this for a while as they walked. They came to the lake and stopped to look at a pair of mallard ducks swimming toward a clump of brown, dried-out cattails and rushes. Emma waved her arms and kicked in excitement.

He continued, "True. But I could see how it might be a reasonable thing for someone, a person, to feel a lot of pain about that, to feel like they weren't important to anyone in the world, under those circumstances. Or if the only people who did seem to care only seemed to like me because of my money."

"Your money?" She poked him.

He repressed a laugh. "Oops. Guess that sort of slipped out."

"Yeah, well, I totally hadn't guessed you were talking about yourself before that," she teased.

"I know. I'm so subtle with my neuroses," he said with a wry twist to his smile.

She laughed, "No, you're a refreshing change from my sledgehammer approach to neurosis."

She quieted down and put her arm around him, leaning against his shoulder as they stood watching the ducks swim along. He turned his head and softly kissed her hair. She looked up at him with serious eyes. "You have us now, you know. You're not alone, and we love you more than you can possibly comprehend."

"I know." He paused to look on as a water bug skated its way by them and a tiny breath of wind ruffled the surface of the water. "You two are my world."

They watched as the mallard drake disappeared into the reeds. Then they turned and headed for home, arms around each other's waists.

Lizzy and Emma went to visit Will at his office on Thursday afternoon following a morning spent with Louisa and her friends. Lizzy had spread her nursing cape out on the leather sofa for Emma to lie on, and now Emma was lying on her tummy with her head up and moving her arms and legs around like a swimmer doing the breaststroke while Lizzy regaled Will with a story about their morning.

A knock came on the door, and Ahmed stuck his head in around the door.

"Oh, sorry, Will. I'll come back later."

Lizzy waved him in with a smile. "No, no, it's nothing important. Please don't let me keep you from your business. We'll sit here quietly."

Ahmed hemmed and hawed for a moment before he finally came out with it. "Well, actually...it's sort of something personal."

Lizzy jumped up. "Oh! I'm sorry. We'll be on our way, then."

"No, no, I don't want to put you out. It's OK if you want to stay."

"What's on your mind, Ahmed?" asked Will, amused at this battle to see who could be more polite.

"Umm...well...Phil and I have some good news. It looks like the adoption is really going through this time. Unless something goes wrong, in about four weeks we're going to have a daughter."

Lizzy jumped up from the sofa. "Oh, Ahmed! That's such great news! Congratulations! I'm so happy for you!" She sprinted over to him to give him a celebratory hug. Then she hurried back to the sofa to keep Emma from falling off onto the floor, even though Will had things well in hand there.

Now he stood up and gave Ahmed a warm two-handed handshake. "That's great, really great. I know how long you've been hoping for this."

Ahmed grinned happily but a little blearily back at them. "Yeah, it's very exciting. But we have a lot to do before she arrives. There were some things we put off because we were afraid the adoption might fall through, like last time."

Lizzy saic, "Yeah, of course. If you need any baby stuff right away, we're happy to share the wealth. We've got a lot of things we've never used, including newborn-sized clothes."

Will broke in, "Oh, I'm sure they'll want new things, Lizzy."

"No, actually, we're not picky," replied Ahmed with a laugh. "Thank you. We might take you up on that." He paused, "Actually, there's more. I wanted to talk to you about taking some time off, Will."

"Sure, of course. What do you need?" He gestured for Ahmed to sit down in a chair next to the desk.

"Well, you know Phil works for that small IT firm, right?"

Will nodded, not certain where this was going.

"So, basically he doesn't get any parental leave, beyond using up his sick days. That's about a week and a half."

Lizzy asked, "He's not eligible for FMLA leave because of the size of the firm, right?"

"Right. If he takes a longer unpaid leave, they won't hold his job for him. So, that leaves it up to me, basically, since we don't think it would be good for us to put her right into child care. We need time to bond, especially since it's an adoption. I talked to HR about it, and they told me that I can take up to 12 weeks of unpaid FMLA leave for parenting."

"So long?" asked Will, aghast.

"Will, it's the law." Lizzy knew you didn't mess with the law.

Ahmed continued, "Well, the thing is...we can't afford it if I take unpaid leave. And I just wondered if it really was company policy that there's no paid parenting leave for men. That's more or less what HR said. I know there's a generous leave policy for mothers, but is there really nothing for fathers?"

Lizzy knew she had probably already said too much in this conversation. This was Will's business. But if what Ahmed said was correct, WPD had a very, very big problem, and they needed to fix it fast, before somebody said something that would get them sued.

"Hmm, well, I don't know..." said Will. Lizzy could see the gears turning in his head, and she suspected he might later regret the words that seemed ready to tumble out of his mouth.

So she broke in, the lawyer in her overcoming the "relationship" part of her that was screaming for her to keep her mouth shut.

"Um, Ahmed, could Will and I have a moment?"

"Sure, sure, I'll just be at my desk." Ahmed made his way out of the office and closed the door behind him.

Will turned on the sofa and shot her a grumpy look. "What the hell was that all about?"

Lizzy raised her eyebrows at him and snapped right back, "That was about keeping you from getting hit with a sex discrimination lawsuit."

"What are you talking about?" Will furrowed his brow.

"Look, you need to make sure that WPD is not, in fact, only giving paid parental leave to women, and for sure you need to find out whether someone in HR is telling people that that's what they're doing. You need to get on the horn right now and find out more about what the company policy is before you say another word to Ahmed. And then you need your lawyer to sit down and look at your leave policies and make sure they are compliant with federal law."

"I know counsel looked it over when we implemented the maternity leave policies, what, almost ten years ago," Will dismissed the issue out of hand.

"These things have changed fast since then. You need to check it out and find out how the laws are being interpreted now, and you also need to make sure that WPD is keeping up with best practices in your sector. Your policies might have been state-of-the-art ten years ago, but if you haven't updated them since then, you may be in trouble now." Lizzy turned back to Emma and pushed against her feet in imitation of pedaling a bicycle.

"Huh. Really. OK, I'll give the lawyers a call." He still sounded a little miffed, but she could see he got that this was serious.

"Good. And, by the way, you should know that if he asks for the full 12 weeks of leave, you're legally obligated to give it to him, with job security, even if it inconveniences you. No retaliation."

"Yeah, I got that. How about this? Let's look at the HR documentation in the employee handbook and see how bad things are. Would you be willing to do that?"

"Of course."

They went over to Will's desk, where she pulled up a chair and they peered at his desktop computer. In Will's arms, Emma fussed some, and Lizzy figured she was probably hungry, so she prepared for a feeding. Emma nursed and then fell asleep while Lizzy and Will looked through the handbook.

After they'd gone over the parts of the manual related to maternity leave, Lizzy said, "Hmm. OK, I can see the, sort of, vestiges of where this policy came from. You started it because you were trying to retain some women associates, right?"

Will nodded. "Right. Some of our top associates said they would leave if we didn't have more accommodations for them during their childbearing years. So that's why we have paid maternity leave, and also why we have things like a part-time track to partnership with no loss of seniority. Those are pretty good policies, right?"

"Yes, up to a point. The thing is, it's written as a disability leave. That means only women who give birth get it-no adoptive parents, no men."

"Oh, I see. It didn't occur to me that that little phrase would have that effect."

"Yup. Also, the way it's written, part-time track to partnership is only available to people, i.e. women, who have taken the disability leave. You know, you should have the employment attorney look over your policies about family caregiving leave, too."

"Huh. This is complicated."

"Yes, it is. And technical, but, as you can see, this little technical stuff can make a big difference for people."

"Right." Will looked like he was turning things over in his mind, his eyes faraway.

"Can you see how WPD's policies makes raising children a women's problem? The policies are definitely better than nothing, but they're also not enough."

"Yeah, I see that."

Lizzy softened her voice. "It's hard, you know, for any of us to imagine what people who aren't like us might need. So maybe when you're updating your handbook, you can think about what you might need to get by if you were someone else's shoes. Say, me, on the one hand, or Ahmed, on the other. What kinds of things might have been able to keep me on the job? What is Ahmed going to need, if he's going to keep working for you? It's not going to be easy to find someone as good as him if he decides to quit, you know."

"You think he'll really quit over this?" Will asked, alarmed.

"If Phil can't get more than a week or two week off, and if they don't want to put a two-week-old baby into child care, which they probably can't anyway, then he'll probably have to, right?"

"Why can't they get child care for a two-week old?"

"Most centers don't take kids until they are about two months old. Charlotte told me. They had a really hard time finding a home daycare for Chloe at six weeks, and they couldn't afford a nanny."

"Huh."

"Look, I'm sorry. I shouldn't have jumped in like that. It's not my business."

"No, don't worry about it. I'm glad you did."

"OK, well, I know you're busy, so we'll get out of your hair." She stood up, holding a sleeping Emma in her arms, and grabbed the diaper bag.

Distracted, Will agreed. He stood up and walked over to kiss both Lizzy and Emma goodbye. He looked at the baby in Lizzy's arms for a moment, stroking Emma's fuzzy head, even though Lizzy was inching toward the door. "I wish I could go with you."

She'd never heard that from him before. How interesting.

She shrugged, "Oh, we're just heading home. Nothing special planned."

"I know."

Lizzy took his hand. "Hey, it's OK. We'll see you at dinner, all right? What do you want tonight?"

"I don't know. Anything is fine."

Lizzy moved back to him and put her arm around him, Emma fast asleep between them. They stood like that for some time, looking down at her and enjoying being together. Then she pulled away and looked at him. Even though he was looking at Emma, he still had that faraway look, as though he were thinking about some kind of possibility he'd never considered before. His smile seemed uncertain, but she couldn't quite tell what was going on in his head.

She leaned up and gave him a kiss, then asked, "Are you OK?"

"Yeah, I'm fine. It's just a lot to think about."

By now Lizzy knew that Will got quiet when he had something big on his mind, and she also knew that no amount of grilling would get him to come out with it until he was good and ready. She wasn't sure exactly what he was thinking about, but she'd bet good money it wasn't limited to whether Ahmed should get paid parental leave or not.

"All right. Let me know when you want to talk about it." She started toward the door, his hand in hers. "Call that employment lawyer, OK?"

"Yeah, I will. And I'll tell Ahmed not to make any rash decisions, because I'm on the case."

"Great. Love you. See you tonight."

"Love you too."

She let go of his hand, opened the door, and turned to give him one last look at Emma before she headed out into his assistant's office, and then down to the street where the town car was waiting.

That day, Will had his staff assistant make an appointment with the WPD's employment lawyer, Marjorie Jacobs. Friday he met with her, and he told Lizzy about the meeting that evening over dinner at the Japanese restaurant near their apartment. They had brought a portable high chair with a tray, and Emma played with some blocks on the tray while Lizzy and Will ate their appetizers of yakitori and cold, fresh tofu with bonito flakes and soy sauce. Lizzy spent approximately half of the time they were in the restaurant under the table retrieving Emma's blocks. Will couldn't fit under the table.

"So, you were right about the leave policy. Marjorie says it leaves us wide open for a sex discrimination or sexual orientation discrimination suit. She recommends that we do a total overhaul of the policy to make sure it's up to date, including covering adoptive parents. So, in the short run, she advised me to give Ahmed the same paid eight weeks of parental leave that we give biological mothers, as sort of a one-off. That will give us some time to have HR investigate best practices and revise all the policies."

Lizzy came up from under the table with a block in her hand and sat back down in her chair. "How did this happen? I thought that you had a really good director of HR, but lately it doesn't sound like it."

"Well, we did, when we first made those policies ten years ago. But she was such a hotshot that she got lured away, to a big software firm in Silicon Valley. I'll talk to the board and see if we can't light a fire under our current guy."

"Hmm. So, are you going to follow Marjorie's advice and give Ahmed the leave?"

He shrugged and sighed. "Yeah, I think we have to. So now I need to find a new PA for while he's gone. Shuffle some people around, maybe. Or get a temp."

"It's a real pain in the butt, huh?"

"Mmm," he agreed noncommittally and shoveled some tofu into his mouth with his chopsticks.

Eyeing him with some amusement, she pretended to grumble, "Damn people with their damn basic biological functions. How dare they get sick or reproduce when it inconveniences me?"

He quirked a smile and said, "OK, laugh it up, but you try finding someone who can do what Ahmed does."

Lizzy put her hands up in the air to indicate she was backing off. "I'm just saying. Actually, that's my point. Finding someone who can keep you going for six weeks is nothing compared to having to start all over with a new PA if Ahmed quits. It's, uh, an investment in valuable human capital."

Will raised his eyebrows as if to say he hadn't quite looked at it that way before. Always make the business case for things with Will, Lizzy reminded herself. Then Emma lunged across her tray for the soy sauce bottle on the table and knocked over Lizzy's water glass, so the conversation was over for now. But maybe they were getting somewhere, slowly.

Thoughts, comments, questions? Leave them below, please.