I pushed open the door to my parents’ old room. I took in their beautiful rich cherry wood bedroom set. The framed watercolor of the Marshbury lighthouse at sunrise hanging over the bed. The Irish lace curtains covering the windows, curtains that my mother used to wash by hand and hang on the clothesline to dry on a hot summer day.

“You’re actually doing me a favor by staying here.” I leaned back against the doorframe. “Since my mother died, I’ve had a really hard time walking into this room. It just makes me miss her so much, you know? Anyway, I think it will help to start thinking of it as your room. And my mother would have loved the idea of a baby in here.” I pointed through the arched entry that led to a sitting area on one side of the room. “We can set that up with the baby stuff. It’s perfect for a nursery.”

Tears rolled down Polly’s cheeks. “See, it’s like I’m a waterworks display.” She sniffed. “I’m sorry I never got to meet your mom.”

I wiped my own eyes. “She would have been crazy about you. And she would have done a much better job of taking care of you than I’m doing.”

“Cut it out.” Polly handed me a tissue from the box on the bedside table. “You hired me for a job I was completely unqualified for, you helped rescue me in a storm, you offered me a place to stay. I can’t imagine anybody else in the world who would have done all that for me.”

I gave her a quick hug. “Do you still miss your parents?”

Polly tucked the car seat into a corner of the sitting area. “I miss the idea of them, I think. They did the best they could, but the truth is that by the time they managed to have me, they didn’t quite know what to do with me. My whole childhood I kept wanting to yell, Here I am, see me! But I didn’t quite have the nerve, you know?”

I tucked the bags of baby clothes in next to the car seat, while I let that sink in. What if by the time John and I managed to have a baby, we didn’t know quite what to do with it either? And we were too set in our ways to figure it out?

I gave Polly another quick hug. “Come on, let’s get to work.”

We dragged everything out of Carol’s room and found a place for it in the new room. I’d already stripped off the sheets Johnny had slept on, so I found another set in the hallway linen closet, and Polly and I made the bed together.

As we were stuffing pillows into the pillowcases, Polly’s phone rang.

She froze.