Alice Brandon-Hale wore four-inch heels to work every day though she was gone three months with child when I met her. She towered over me when she brought back her edits of my edits. The apologies she made for her bitchiness were not sincere and so I did not pretend to accept them. She said she quit smoking when she got pregnant and also was without wine, a double damning that left her to profanities and chewing out her bumpkin assistant.

"Do you think you ought to work on the way you speak?" The question came one day after a thirty-minute tirade over the way I had edited some elevator text on a book jacket had barely petered out. "I don't know how I feel about it. I suppose it's charmingly colloquial but to everyone who doesn't know you, you just sound stupid." Her hair was down to her waist by fall and she wore it in waves like a Victoria's Secret model. She had a habit of flipping it over her shoulder when she was pissed off or annoyed or whenever she talked at me, really. I would've worried about it, but I had other things on my mind, I reckon.

There were days then, as the calendar pages changed but LA stayed sunny and perfect, that I wondered if Mama had known about the babies with Edward. Sunshine day after day with endless hours with a pregnant city wench felt like the kind of hell she would've raised had she knowed about it all. I'd done had about what I could take and possible firing or not, I said so.

"I didn't ask how you felt about it. The way I speak is the way I speak. It don't affect my work, so I don't see as how it's none of your daggone business. Ma'am."

When I looked up over my computer screen, Mrs. Brandon-Hale was smiling. She was quite fetching when she smiled and that was disconcerting, because it felt wrong to find someone so seemingly unkind attractive in any way.

"Well," she said, lifting her tiny body with her growing bump off the table in my cubicle, "You're either exceedingly stupid or brilliantly rash. I shall endeavor not to fire you until I can decide."

By late November, we had reached an understanding. She was staying sick well into her second trimester. I brought her herbs for her tea and ointment for her stretching stomach made from fresh things I found at the Santa Monica farmer's market. I don't know why I did it, except that she was good at her work and fair with mine. I was improving under her hawk's eye. Truth told, I felt bad for her. Pregnancy did not suit her. The dark circles under her eyes were crow's shadows that no amount of fancy makeup could cover. And yet she wanted her baby so much. She was forty-one and well past the time when most women might conceive. I guess I saw myself in her desperation. Edward said no woman who fought to be a mama could be bad inside. It ain't in them to be evil if they want to protect an unborn baby. I never had knew him to be wrong except when he'd said we were bound for parenthood ourselves. I guessed no one was right all the time.

She reminded me to close the blinds in my office and power down my computer one evening as I wrestled with an author biography that read like a obituary. "We're closed the rest of the week for Thanksgiving. I assume you're flying home?"

"Of course."

"Well…" She was hovering around the short wall by my table, her fist in her back near her sciatic nerve. "Have a good flight. I hope security isn't a bitch."

It was concern and I took it at face value and smiled as genuinely as I could. "You just gotta know how to talk to them. Colloquial charm and all."

She laughed. "Right. Let me know when you start bottling that."

I didn't go home for Thanksgiving. I couldn't face him. I couldn't walk down the aisle at evening church with Daddy and see him over there with Guv and Essie May and pretend that my life was rolling on without us. Life endured despite my best efforts to build a concrete wall of work that would finally make all the noise in my head stop. I functioned –work, long walk, repeat, and retreat to madness every night. Every second of every hour I breathed with my empty womb eroding my sanity and a sucking hole in my heart where he and those two babies tugged at me, crushing me with what could have been, what should have been, what I might have done, and worst of all, what might never be.

The grief and the second-guessing weighed on me. I had signed up to serve meals to the homeless at a local non-denominational church. Plenty of people had it worse than me. Ladling up gravy and canned cranberry through a ten-hour shift had helped me put my troubles and my blessings in perspective but it was still tough to start the walk home.

I was wrestling with myself, fighting my way out of the bottom of a pond in cowboy boots with tow straps at my wrists. Every step felt like a reminder that somewhere, many miles away, was a life I had run from.

The California sun was setting in a blaze of red and orange when I rounded the corner and caught sight of a tall man in a cowboy hat leaning against the outside of my complex. Alejandro, the super, pointed up at him, telling him loitering was prohibited and unless the tenant he was there for would be home soon, he would need to wait someplace else.

"He's here for me, Alex," I said.

"Yes," Edward said, taking off his hat so his hair glowed like a fire in the sunset. "Yes, Bella, I am."

Glory to God, it felt good to hear him say it.