The Baby Bonding. Caroline Anderson

be OK. It was just such a lot all at once. I’m sorry, darling. I’m all right now.’

      She pulled herself together with an effort, blew her nose and wiped her eyes, and then swapped grins with her darling daughter. She was so like Mick, so sensible, so good at understanding her, hugely generous and loving.

      Crazy, but even after all this time, she still missed him. He’d had the best sense of humour, the sharpest wit, the most tremendous sense of honour.

      And dignity. Despite the accident that had left him in a wheelchair, and with all the resultant dependence on others for his most intimate bodily functions, Mick had never lost his dignity, and she’d been unfailingly proud of him.

      She wondered what he would have made of her decision to be a surrogate mother. She’d always thought he’d have been supportive and understanding, but he would have worried about her. She could never have done it if he’d still been alive, but he wasn’t, and it had been something to do to fill the huge void that his sudden and unexpected death had left behind.

      In those black months after the pneumonia had claimed him, she’d been lost. She’d cared for him for years, and suddenly there had been only her and Libby, and she’d felt useless.

      She’d needed to be needed, and because of a chance remark, she’d been given an opportunity to do something to help others who were unable to have children naturally. Because of Mick’s paraplegia they’d only been able to have Libby with the help of IVF, and it was only one step further to imagine the anguish of a fertile mother who, due to a physical anomaly, was unable to carry her own child.

      She couldn’t have done it except as a host, but neither of the two children she’d carried had been genetically hers. They’d both been implanted embryos, so handing them over hadn’t been like handing over her own child. That would have been too big a wrench.

      Handing Jack over and knowing she wouldn’t see him again had been bad enough. It had taken her years to get over the pain, and she realised now that she had never truly recovered. If he’d been her own child, it would have destroyed her. It had nearly destroyed her anyway, but now, by some miraculous stroke of fate, he was back in her life, and she didn’t intend to let him out of it ever again.

      The fact that Sam would also, by definition, be part of her life as well was something she would have to deal with—and so would he.