And, just like that, I had found my new calling. I was going to be a journalist. I was going to investigate what was wrong with the world and change it. My inability to have children wasn’t anyone’s fault. I was going to fix the problems that were.

I pulled out the little pink-and-purple journal that I kept between my mattress and box spring. Why I kept it there, I couldn’t say. I didn’t have any secrets—until now. In it, I wrote Goals: 1. Become editor in chief of a magazine. 2. Find a man that loves me even though I can’t have children.

Then I went downstairs and asked Mom if I could get a subscription to the Wall Street Journal, to Vogue, to any publication that mattered. I started reading that day. I wrote my first investigative piece in September of that year about how the female lunch ladies deserved equal pay to the male janitor.

A mother died. A journalist was born. So how was it that reading Greer’s letter had made an old flame flicker in me again, the one that thought maybe she wanted to feel those things she knew she never would?

After tossing and turning for hours, I must have finally fallen asleep. When I woke up, I picked up my phone and discovered it was nearly ten in the morning. I hadn’t slept that late in years. As I yawned and stretched, it all came flooding back to me. The dance with Parker. The surrogates. My decision to ask him if I could carry his child. I could imagine the eyebrows I would raise with this.

My friend Martin, who I had met at a party six years ago and clicked with instantly, was the only one who would understand, so he was the one I called that morning. My other friends would pretend to understand, but they wouldn’t really. They all wanted husbands and babies and traditional lives. They would say that I was ruining my chance at all that. They would view my choice as a response to my bad divorce, a bitter hangover that would clear—as soon as I found the right man. Martin really got what I was going through because his husband had left him for a woman.

So I was a little shocked when Martin—free-spirited, live-your-truth Martin—said, “Liabelle, have you lost your mind?”

Martin went home with me two years ago for Christmas, right after his separation, and still can’t get over that my family calls me Liabelle. “I mean, maybe. Maybe I have. I guess after getting unceremoniously dumped from the job that has been my life for the past thirteen years and being traded in for Chase, maybe I’m not doing all that great. So yeah, it’s possible that I’m losing my mind.”

“If you want to do something nice for Parker, send him flowers when the babies are born. Bake a casserole in an oven. Don’t be the oven.” Before I could say anything else, he said, “Look. Meet me at Café Boulud. Let’s have a good omelette and a glass of wine and talk through this.”