The Good Daughter Read Free

too. It was good cake. Meg was an excellent baker.
    After Gabi left, Mom circled her teacup with her hands. “You won’t ever forget your Tommy,” she said quietly. “I know I’ve told you this before, but I’ve never forgotten the babies I lost. There were three between Meg and the twins. I never knew if they were boys or girls. Back then they didn’t tell you those things. I wondered, though.”
    “What did Dad do when you lost them?” Cass asked, brow furrowing.
    “Told me he was sorry. That he loved me.” Marilyn paused, looking back, remembering the years of being a young wife and mother. “That I would conceive again. And then he’d go to work. Escape to his beloved firehouse. To his boys.” Her voice held the barest hint of bitterness. “He was lucky. He had somewhere else to go. I was here alone with a toddler.”
    The clock in the living room suddenly chimed nine. It caught them by surprise. No one knew when it’d gotten so late, and it was Sunday night, a school night. Meg said she’d need to get the kids home soon. They lived in Santa Rosa. And once Meg and Jack left, everyone else would go, too. Tommy and Cass to Walnut Creek. Kit to her small house in Oakland.
    “I’d try again,” Cass said in a rush when the clock stopped chiming. “I’ve met with a new specialist, a doctor who thinks he can help me, but Tommy has said no. Says he can’t go through that again.”
    Kit opened her mouth to speak but then thought better of it. She wasn’t married. Had never been married. Wasn’t her place.
    Instead, Mom said carefully, “Maybe he just needs more time—”
    “It’s our eleventh wedding anniversary this year. I want a baby.” Cass’s voice dropped, deepening with emotion. “I don’t want to wait. I can’t wait. I’m ready to be a mom now.”
    “Have you two considered using a surrogate?” Kit asked, feeling Cass’s desperation and aware that her brother didn’t want to adopt. He’d wanted a son to follow in his footsteps, just the way he’d followed in his father’s. The Brennan men had been San Francisco firefighters for six generations, all the way back before the Great Earthquake and Fire of 1906, and Tommy Jr. was proud of this legacy. Maybe too proud.
    “Tommy says the Church is against it.”
    “The Church doesn’t support IVF either,” Meg pointed out.
    This was greeted by uncomfortable silence, which stretched until Meg added, “Maybe it’s time you and Tommy revisited the idea of adopting—”
    “He won’t,” Cass said shortly. “It’s our baby or nothing.”
    Meg gestured impatiently. “But when you adopt, that baby becomes your baby.”
    “I know, but Tommy won’t even discuss it. He wants—” Cass broke off as the front door opened and the men’s voices could be heard in the hall. She pressed her lips together, frustration and resentment in her tense expression. “Let’s just let this go. Okay?”
    They did.
    But in the car, driving home, Kit played the evening over in her head. The cheerful dinner conversation where everyone made an effort to be light, kind, funny, and even Meg and Jack seemed to put their differences aside for the night. The fluffy coconut cake on the heirloom. The dimmed lights. The golden glow of the birthday candles. Her dad’s big baritone singing “Happy Birthday.” The bittersweet chorus of “make a wish”…
    Hands flexing against the steering wheel, Kit thought of the wishes that had come to her. Wishes she’d make if it were her birthday…
    For Mom to live
.
    For Cass to have her baby
.
    For Jack and Meg’s marriage to survive this rocky transition
.
    And for Kit herself? What did she want personally? What was her heart’s desire? That was easy. She was selfish. Wasn’t wishing for world peace or clean water for Third World nations. No, she wanted love. Marriage. Babies. She wanted to have her own family. She’d be forty in a couple of weeks. It was time. The clock was ticking.
    And yet, if she had only one