Free Dear Thing by Julie Cohen

under Claire’s grandmother’s quilt, Posie was going home with Romily.
    Claire knew Posie. She loved Posie. And yet Posie had come from Romily’s body. And now Romily was offeringher body to Claire and Ben, as if it were a bicycle to be borrowed for a little while and then returned.
    ‘I don’t get why she’d want to do it,’ she said again, when Helen returned from sorting out the squabble. ‘It’s a big commitment.’
    ‘I wish I’d thought of it,’ said Helen. ‘I couldn’t do it, not after all the problems I had with Sarah. But I wish I’d thought of it. I wish I’d offered.’
    She looked sad, and Claire hugged her. ‘Don’t be silly. That’s lovely of you to say, but you couldn’t possibly.’
    ‘It would’ve solved a lot of problems.’ Helen shrugged. ‘Oh well, no use thinking of it now. But if this Romily is healthy and she’s willing, maybe you should give it a shot. At least she’s a known quantity, right? You know she’s got good genes – she’s clever, isn’t she? You know she can give birth. You like her daughter. You know she’s not going anywhere.’ Sarah toddled into the kitchen, and Helen broke a biscuit in half and gave it to her. ‘You know a lot more about her than you would an anonymous egg donor, or another surrogate. Or the parents of a child you’d adopted.’
    ‘But it’s the way that Ben went about it, without even telling me.’
    ‘He’s desperate. You both are, aren’t you?’
    Does it show so much?
She looked around at her sister’s modern kitchen, which was saved from being minimalist by the plastic tablecloth, the children’s drawings on the refrigerator. She’d hardly been here at all in the past four years since Josh had been born.
    ‘What would Mum say?’ she said instead.
    Her sister smiled. ‘Ah, well, there’s another thing. Sarah, don’t eat that, you’ve just dropped it on the floor!’

8
Building Blocks
    MONTHS AGO, THEY’D promised to take Posie and Romily to Legoland in Windsor in the first week of the Easter holiday. The night before, Claire lay in bed with her head on Ben’s chest.
    ‘What if she’s changed her mind?’ she asked.
    ‘She won’t. Once Romily makes up her mind, she doesn’t change it.’
    ‘Unlike me.’
    He stroked her hair. ‘I went about it the wrong way. I shouldn’t have sprung it on you like that.’
    ‘No more deciding my life in the pub, all right?’
    ‘Agreed. But you do want this to happen, don’t you, Claire?’
    She’d thought of little else for weeks. All of the calm she’d felt that day under the pear tree had fled. She’d been able to feel calm because she’d been at the end of hope, and now there was this new possibility. Her mind gnawed away at it: pros, cons, legal issues. She’d been on internet surrogacy forums to read the stories. There were happy ones and some sad ones. There were a lot of couples who were looking fora surrogate and hadn’t yet found one. She recognized the desperation lying under their typed words.
    ‘For six years,’ she said, ‘every month that’s gone by has felt like another month that’s been stolen from us. Another chance gone. If this is another chance, I can’t pass it up.’
    ‘So we’ll ask her?’
    ‘Yes.’ She wished she could feel that calm again. She wished she could know that this was right. But how would they know without trying?
    ‘Yes,’ she repeated.
    Romily twisted her hands in the pockets of her jeans and watched Posie skipping ahead of them down the path towards a robotic dinosaur made out of Lego. The sun was too bright, the park too crowded, and the colours and canned music more or less obscene. She didn’t quite dare to look at Ben or Claire.
    Ben hadn’t mentioned their conversation again, not since their secret meeting in February. Aside from texted arrangements about today, they’d barely been in contact. Meanwhile she knew that he and Claire were talking about it. Talking about her.
    She glanced over at Claire,