I did not want to give you up.
Angela rolls her shoulders back, refocuses her eyes on the page in front of her. She’s taken aback by the candidness of Dr. Taylor’s memoir. Her experience sounds as horrific as she imagines Margaret Roberts’s was, and the detail induces Angela to wrap one arm around her stomach. She can’t imagine being forced to give up her baby like these girls were. She’s about to set the book aside and give her emotions a break when she reads something that causes her breath to catch.
My best friend at the Home—I’ll call her “Maggie”—took her own life after the trauma she experienced at that place. I lost both my best friend and my daughter to lack of choice, and I knew, after I left, that I would find a way to make sure other girls would always—always—have a choice.
“Maggie?” Angela says aloud to Grizzly, who has curled up in a tight coil in the groove of her tented knees. “As in Margaret?”
Angela stares at the sentence, her thoughts whirring. In the introduction, Dr. Taylor said she would be changing the names of all the women she mentions in an effort to protect the true identities of anyone who might not want their criminal activity revealed, even all these years later. But Maggie? Margaret?
Angela chews her lip, then flips back a few pages, looking for where the author mentions the year she spent at the maternity home. She just says “the early 60s.” Surely there were plenty of girls named Maggie at maternity homes at that time. Margaret was a fairly common name back then.
She hears the clicking of a key in the lock, the front door shutting.
“Woo! It’s frickin’ cold out there again!” Tina stomps the snow off her boots on the front hall mat. “Where the hell is spring? Taking it’s sweet-ass time, apparently.” A minute later, she’s in the living room.
“Good workout?” Angela asks.
“Yeah, it was fine. Glad I went, anyway. Now I can have ice cream later and not feel guilty. That’s how that works, right?”
Angela smiles in a vague way but isn’t really listening. “Tina, would you be able to put me in touch with Evelyn Taylor?”
Tina’s shiny brow furrows. “Sure, I guess. Why?”
CHAPTER 19 Nancy
JULY 1984
On a Thursday afternoon in the height of the summer heat, Nancy and her boyfriend Michael are sitting in a patch of welcome shade outside the café in Kensington Market where they had their first date. They happily sip fresh-squeezed lemonade and share a piece of truly exceptional almond coffee cake while people-watching out of the corner of their eye.
Nancy is on her summer holiday from work this week, and Michael planned his to coincide with hers. And at his suggestion, they whiled away the morning in the cool air-conditioned refuge of the art gallery, wandering its wide halls and dark exhibits. It was a welcome respite for Nancy, who has spent most of her vacation with her parents. Her mother is in remission from the cancer now. Her treatment went well, but she’s a weaker, diminished version of her former self, somehow much more vulnerable than she used to be. Nancy worried that she should stay home with her, but when Frances heard that Michael was taking her out, she shooed her out the door.
Nancy had debated bringing Michael home to meet them last summer, but after a few dates, she’d realized quite quickly that he might be worth hanging on to, and decided to introduce him to her parents. The first time he leaned in to kiss her, on her front step after a date at the movies, he’d asked for her permission first. He supported her desire for a career of her own, worked hard, and didn’t drink too much. And he turned out to be incredible with Frances. He connected with her in a way that Nancy had certainly never been able to, helping her off couches she was too weak to stand up from and telling jokes to distract her from the bouts of nausea she was still susceptible to. Nancy had never heard her mother laugh like she did with Michael, not before the cancer, and certainly not after. He even cooked the whole family dinner one night when Frances’s blood pressure dropped so low that Nancy and her father had to rush her to the hospital. They came home to find Michael in the kitchen wearing her mother’s floral apron with a pasta dinner ready on the table, complete with salad and wine.
“Hang on to this one, Beetle,” Nancy’s dad muttered under his breath as he helped her mother out of her jacket.
She worried then about what might happen if they broke up. Her mother would be devastated, and Nancy couldn’t stand the thought of that. But nearly a year has passed since then, and she and Michael are still crazy about one another. It’s the best Nancy has felt about her life in a long time, and for the most part she’s comfortable being herself around him. She hasn’t, however, shared with him that she’s working with the Jane Network.
Not long after she ran into Dr. Taylor outside St. Sebastian’s the previous summer, she went to the recruitment meeting. Her relationship with Michael was still so new, she told herself, and what she was doing was illegal. While her girlfriends are out doing normal things like shopping or going to the movies, she revels in the knowledge that she’s helping other women gain power over their own lives. And although she trusts Michael, the less anyone knows about the network and its activity, the better, which is also why she’s never told him about her own abortion.
“What next?” Nancy asks Michael now, as he insists she take the last bite of cake.
A family with three noisy children passes by their table on the sidewalk outside the café. The little girl points at Nancy’s lemonade and starts shrieking that she wants one, too. Her rather harassed-looking, sweaty mother nods feebly and directs her family toward the doors to the café.
Michael smirks and shakes his head as though clearing his ears of the lingering squeal of the girl’s high-pitched shriek.
“I was just thinking that myself,” Michael says. “What’s next.”
Nancy stares back at him, brown eyes meeting blue over the tip of the straw from her glass. “I’m easy. Want to go down to the Queen’s Quay? Or out to the island? Maybe rent some bikes?”
Michael rakes a hand through his sandy hair, then glances over his shoulder at the few other patrons who have braved the scorching heat of the patio on a day like this. He turns back to Nancy. “I was thinking a bit bigger than that.”
Nancy sets down her empty glass. “Okay. What did you have in mind?”
Michael smiles and lets his breath out in one long, hot stream. Birds twitter in the small privet bush to Nancy’s left.
“Well,” Michael says, rising from his seat.
He reaches deep into the pocket of his shorts and pulls out a tiny black box. Nancy watches him kneel in front of her as though it’s being played back to her in slow motion, like a dream. Her surroundings become blurred. All she can see is Michael’s shining face looking up at her over the sparkling diamond ring in his hand.
“I was kind of thinking about forever. I think forever is next.”
“Oh, Michael.”
Nancy vaguely registers a gasp from one of the other patrons on the patio. “Look! Look!” the woman hisses at her husband.
“I wanted to bring you back to the place where I first fell in love with you. I knew as soon as I met you that you were the one for me. I was a goner. We sat at this table and you ordered me a double espresso that was so strong I nearly had a heart attack, but I didn’t care. There was a glow about you that night just like there is now. Like a spotlight was shining down on you, leading me home.”