Free The Midwife's Confession by Diane Chamberlain

given her Noelle’s old sewing machine and shown her how to hem the little blankets that were part of the layettes donated to sick or needy infants. When Grace told me what she was up to, I put my hand on her forehead as if checking for fever. “Are you all right?” I’d smiled. Wrong move.
    She’d jerked her head away from my hand. “I’m fine,” she said. “Don’t make a big production out of it.”
    I doubted she’d be one of the volunteers who delivered the layettes to the hospital. Ever since Sam’s accident, she’d been nearly phobic of hospitals. She’d told me that if I ever needed hospitalization, she wouldn’t visit me. She wouldn’t even visit Cleve in the hospital, she’d said. I blamed myself. When we reached the emergency room after Sam’s accident, I plowed through the treatment room doors in a panic with Grace close on my heels. Even I couldn’t bear to remember what we saw in that room—Sam’s beautiful face, bloodied and torn apart. Grace had fainted, dropping to the floor behind me like a stone.
    “So,” Ian said, “did you find anything at Noelle’s that seemed…out of the ordinary?”
    I shook my head. “Emerson had to examine everything she touched for clues,” I said. “She thinks something in that house is going to tell us why she killed herself or what happened to her child or why she lied to us about being a midwife.”
    Noelle and midwife . The words went together like milk and cookies. “Midwife” defined who she was in my mind. In all of our minds. Hadn’t at least one of us introduced her as a midwife over the past decade and hadn’t she said nothing to correct us? It was bizarre.
    Ian tapped his fingertip against the base of his empty wineglass. “Noelle…” He shook his head. “It was impossible to know what was going on with her sometimes.”
    I felt sorry for him. I knew how much he’d once loved her. “It must have been so hard on you when she broke off the engagement.”
    “Oh, God, Tara.” He brushed the comment aside. “It was so long ago. Another lifetime ago.”
    “I don’t remember you getting angry. I think most men would have been furious.”
    “I was more worried about her than angry,” he said. Then he shifted in his chair and smiled again. “Let’s lighten up, okay. Let’s not talk about Noelle or Sam or anything sad for the rest of the night.”
    “Perfect,” I agreed.
    “So—” he cut a plump scallop in half on his plate “—when’s the last time you actually went out to a movie instead of watching a rental at home?”
    I thought back through the recent months, then wrinkled my nose. “Not since Sam,” I said.
    He laughed. “Okay, let me try that again.” He looked up at the ceiling as if searching there for a safe topic. His eyes suddenly brightened behind his glasses. “I’m thinking of getting a dog,” he said.
    “You’re kidding!” I knew he loved our dog, Twitter, but I couldn’t picture him with one of his own. “A puppy? Or an older rescue, or—”
    “Puppy,” he said. “I haven’t had one since I was a kid. I’d have to do more of my work at home for a while, I guess.”
    “I think it’s a great idea,” I said. “Maybe you could get two so they could entertain each other while—”
    “Tara?” I looked up to see an older woman walking toward our table. I was so caught up in the idea of Ian with a puppy that it took me a moment to recognize her.
    “Barbara!” I rose to my feet and gave her a hug. “It’s good to see you.” I hadn’t seen Barbara Read since her retirement party a couple of years ago. Ian was getting to his feet, as well. “Ian, this is Barbara Read,” I said. “She used to teach math at Hunter.”
    “Sit down now, both of you.” Barbara smiled. She looked great, her coppery hair cut very short and her skin satin-smooth. Retirement definitely agreed with her. “Oh, honey,” she said to me once I took my seat again, “I’m glad to see you looking so well. I was