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Following her bestselling debut novel Come Away with Me, Karma Brown returns with an unforgettable story that explores the intricate dynamics of friendship and parenthood
Hannah and Kate became friends in the fifth grade, when Hannah hit a boy for looking up Kate’s skirt with a mirror. While they’ve been close as sisters ever since, Hannah can’t help but feel envious of the little family Kate and her husband, David, have created—complete with two perfect little girls.
She and Ben have been trying for years to have a baby, so when they receive the news that she will likely never get pregnant, Hannah’s heartbreak is overwhelming. But just as they begin to tentatively explore the other options, it’s Kate’s turn to do the rescuing. Not only does she offer to be Hannah’s surrogate, but Kate is willing to use her own eggs to do so.
Full of renewed hope, excitement and gratitude, these two families embark on an incredible journey toward parenthood…until a devastating tragedy puts everything these women have worked toward at risk of falling apart. Poignant and refreshingly honest, The Choices We Make is a powerful tale of an incredible friendship and the risks we take to make our dreams come true.
Praise for the novels of Karma Brown
“With effortless and beautiful writing, Karma Brown twists heartache and hope together in The Choices We Make, taking you on each character’s complicated emotional journey and exploring how the worst-case scenario can still bring joy.”
—Amy E. Reichert, author of Luck, Love & Lemon Pie and
The Coincidence of Coconut Cake
“Laughing one minute, then fiercely blinking back tears the next, we tore through this novel—so gripping that we were both excited and scared out of our minds to turn the page. Karma Brown has proven herself to be a master at writing about the many facets of love in this stunning page-turner.”
—Liz Fenton and Lisa Steinke, authors of The Status of All Things
“The Choices We Make describes one woman’s desperate longing for a baby and her best friend’s desire to help.… [A] story about friendship, and love, and sacrifice.”
—Julie Lawson Timmer, author of Five Days Left and Untethered
“I was already emotionally invested in this beautifully written story of love and loss when an unexpected turn of events knocked the wind right out of me. Heart-wrenching yet hopeful, Come Away with Me had me smiling through my tears.”
—Tracey Garvis Graves, New York Times bestselling author of On the Island
“Come Away with Me tells the heartbreaking yet hopeful tale of a life lost and a life reclaimed. Fans of Elizabeth Gilbert’s Eat Pray Love will flock to this novel…. Karma Brown is a talented new voice in women’s fiction.”
—Lori Nelson Spielman, author of The Life List
“Come Away with Me is full of lush locations, memorable characters, and a turn of events that is nothing short of jaw-dropping. Brown’s work is as smart as it is effortless to read.”
—Taylor Jenkins Reid, author of Forever, Interrupted and After I Do
“[A]dventurous, heartbreaking yet ultimately hopeful… This emotional love story will stick with you long after you’ve turned the final page.”
—Colleen Oakley, author of Before I Go, on Come Away with Me
“Brown’s debut knocks it out of the park…. An impressive study of loss, reconciliation, and brave choices with a stunning, three-hanky ending. A strong ensemble of supporting characters fills out this impressive story that carries away the reader’s heart and imagination.”
—Publishers Weekly on Come Away with Me
“Brown’s novel is cathartic and heartbreaking…will leave you in tears, so definitely have a box of tissues handy.”
—RT Book Reviews, 4 stars, on Come Away with Me
“A warmly compelling love story… Have tissues at hand for Brown’s deeply moving debut.”
—Booklist on Come Away with Me
www.mirabooks.co.uk
For my sister, Jenna, because she made me a mother.
Author’s Note
I am often told my daughter has my eyes and looks exactly like me. I love hearing this because it’s a beautiful reminder to be grateful for how she came to be.
The first time my husband and I talked about having kids was the day I sat in my oncologist’s office, raw and reeling from my shocking cancer diagnosis at the age of thirty. Along with words like chemotherapy and radiation, I was also told the lifesaving treatment would bring with it more than debilitating nausea, fatigue and hair loss. It also could cost me my fertility. So the first time my husband and I talked about kids was also the moment I learned I might never become a mother.
Luckily my oncologist was forward thinking and determined I would know motherhood. What followed were exhausting and rushed fertility procedures that left us with twenty-one embryos on ice, all set for when I was cancer-free and ready to start a family.
Despite our plentiful embryos and a boatload of determination, my body was too damaged from treatment, and pregnancy was impossible. However, my sister, Jenna, had promised she’d carry a baby for me if I ever needed her to, and so without hesitation that was exactly what she did. With this promise and one of our perfect embryos, Jenna made us parents in June 2008 through the incredible gift of gestational surrogacy.
It took 1,825 days for us to become parents. It was not an easy road, nor one I would wish on anyone despite our fairy-tale ending. But every injection, procedure, medication, worry, challenge and dollar spent was worth it. Because I am a mom.
The Choices We Make is not our story. But my experiences are scattered throughout the pages, as is my gratitude for my sister and all the women who have helped others know parenthood—it is a gift never to be taken for granted.
Contents
Cover
Back Cover Text
Praise
Title Page
Dedication
Author’s Note
Epigraph
Chapter 1
14 Months Earlier
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
Chapter 39
Chapter 40
Chapter 41
Chapter 42
Chapter 43
Chapter 44
Chapter 45
Chapter 46
Chapter 47
Chapter 48
Chapter 49
Chapter 50
Chapter 51
Chapter 52
Chapter 53
Chapter 54
Chapter 55
Chapter 56
Chapter 57
Chapter 58
Chapter 59
Acknowledgments
Reader’s Guide
Questions for Discussion
A Conversation with Karma Brown
Extract
Copyright
The world breaks everyone and afterward many are strong at the broken places.
Ernest Hemingway
1
HANNAH
When the phone rings at seven o’clock on Tuesday night, I think it’s odd but I don’t worry. You save that for the calls that come in the middle of the night, the ones that wake you in a panic and surely mean someone has died. Normally I don’t even answer our landline—a relic from my high school days, so basic it doesn’t even have a display screen. Ben thinks we should cancel the service, as no one calls us on it except telemarketers, my mother every so often, and my best friend, Kate, though generally by accident because she has an irrational fear of updating her contacts list.
Deciding it must be a telemarketer as Mom is at her bridge club night and I just spoke with Kate an hour ago, I continue chopping peppers for the fajitas and wait for the answering machine—circa the same year as the phone—to pick up.
“Hannah? Are you there?” The voice is strained, uncertain but familiar.
Tripping over the puppy, asleep in the middle of the kitchen floor, I wipe my hands on the thighs of my jeans and grab the phone.
“Hello? David?” The puppy, awake now, nips at my leg, her high-pitched attempt at a growl more amusing than annoying. “Get off, Clover!” I whisper, trying to sound like the leader the dog obedience instructor told me I need to be. Clover ignores me, continuing her assault on the hem of my jeans. I look over at Ben for help, but he’s reading his tablet on the couch, oblivious to it all.
“Hannah—” David says my name again, but this time in a rush. As if he’s been holding his breath and is only just allowed to let it out. I gently shake Clover off my leg and throw a treat from my back pocket toward the couch. She promptly chases it before jumping up and snuggling her tiny, fluffy white body against Ben while she crunches the biscuit. He rubs her head, murmuring, “Good girl,” and I place my hand over the mouthpiece. “Remember who feeds you,” I say to her before speaking into the phone again.
“David, hey. When are you and Kate getting here? My impatient and apparently ravenous husband has already eaten most of the guacamole.” I glance at Ben, and he smiles before leaning forward to grab his cell off the ottoman, which was buried under a few magazines and stuffed dog toys. He frowns at the display screen and when he looks back at me his face is creased with concern. A ribbon of anxiety wraps around my chest as I think of my cell phone, forgotten upstairs on the bathroom vanity. I tap my baby finger against the curved plastic of the handset, not liking how my insides feel. “Wait, how did you get this number?”
Ben stands quickly, Clover tumbling off his lap.
It’s then I realize David isn’t responding because he’s crying. Suddenly I hear a lot of other noises, too. Beeping, like an incessant alarm clock. A garbled voice over a loudspeaker. The sounds of busy people, doing important things.
“David, where are you?”
Ben is beside me now, showing me his phone’s display. A string of missed calls from David.
“Hannah... I’m at the hospital... I don’t know what happened... Everything was fine, and then she just...”
“What’s wrong?” My heart pumps furiously. “Is it one of the girls?” Kate must be panicking, which is likely why David was calling instead of her. The ribbon of anxiety winds tighter.
And with his answer, I see the moment my life changes.
14 MONTHS EARLIER
2
KATE
June
I checked my cell again, the fifteenth time in the last five minutes.
“Call me,” I told David. “I want to make sure this is working.”
“It’s working,” David said, cutting up strawberries and bananas into small pieces. Even though our girls were eleven and seven, David, a paramedic, still insisted on their food being bite-size to prevent choking.
David licked strawberry juice off his fingers and looked up at me. “Give her time, Katie. It’s barely six o’clock.”
“I know, but I had such a good feeling this time. And if it were good news, she would have called by now, right? Right?”
David scraped the fruit into the girls’ bowls, then placed them on the table beside their dinners—barbecue chicken drumsticks, with carrot and cucumber sticks. “Ava! Josie! Dinner!” he hollered up the stairs before coming back to the kitchen.
“If it’s good news, maybe she and Ben are celebrating by themselves first,” he said. “And if it’s bad news? Maybe she’s not ready to talk about it.”
The girls came bounding into the kitchen. “What’s for dinner?” Ava, our eldest, asked.
“Chicken and veggies,” I said, pouring two glasses of milk and handing them to Ava. I topped up my glass of wine and handed David a beer. He wasn’t back on shift until the morning, which meant we could have a relaxed dinner after the girls went to bed and binge watch Netflix.
“I don’t like chicken,” Josie said, scrunching up her nose.
“Yes, you do,” David replied, pushing her chair closer to the table after she sat down. She protested by shoving the plate farther away.
“I don’t!” Josie crossed her arms over her chest, and I tried to hide my smile behind my wineglass. She looked just like David when she was mad, her dirty-blond eyebrows knitting together in a stern V shape.
“Since when, jelly bean?” I sat across from her at the table and nudged her plate back, taking a sip of my wine. Josie was my sweet and spicy kid—one moment snuggling contentedly, the next slamming doors and declaring life unfair and utterly disappointing. She was named after my grandmother Josephine, who had been a midwife during the war and who, according to family legend, was not a woman to mess with. I had only vague memories of Grandma Josephine, her death coming a day after my sixth birthday. But I do remember she always carried those red-and-white-swirled peppermints in the bottom of her purse, usually stuck to old pieces of tissue, that she drank a shot of whiskey every morning in her tea and that she suffered from frequent migraine headaches—something I had unfortunately inherited.
“Ever since she watched Chicken Run at Gram’s,” Ava said, biting into her drumstick with enthusiasm. While Josie was my loud and emotional child, Ava had always been more even-keeled, like David, and usually had her nose in a book. But she had a wicked sense of humor—which I liked to take credit for—and was quite skilled at pushing her sister’s buttons.
Sensing an opportunity to do just that, Ava ripped her teeth through a large chunk of skin and meat and chewed loudly as she leaned closer to Josie, making smacking noises with her lips. I shot Ava a warning glance, then got up and made Josie a peanut-butter-and-honey sandwich, cutting the crusts off—which I knew I had to stop doing one day soon. Placing it on her plate and taking the drumstick for myself, I avoided David’s stare. We had argued just last night about how quick I was to offer options if the girls didn’t eat what was put in front of them.
Nibbling the drumstick, I looked back at my phone.
“Kate, she’s okay.” David swallowed the last dregs in his beer bottle. He got up to grab another and stopped to kiss the top of my head before sitting back at the table with me.
But I knew she wasn’t. Hannah had been my best friend for twenty-five years, and I knew her better than anyone else.
3
HANNAH
Ben and I had been married for 2,190 days, and we’d been trying to get pregnant for nearly every one of those.
We met in Jamaica, at the wedding of my college friend Jasmine, who also turned out to be Ben’s first cousin. He was tall and funny and had a thing for useless party tricks, like balancing a salt shaker on its edge and folding a dollar bill into a tiny collared T-shirt, which I found irresistibly charming—especially after a few rum punches. With skin the color of steeped tea with a long pour of cream thanks to his Jamaican mother, and deep blue eyes he’d inherited from his American father, Ben regaled me with stories of his childhood in Jamaica, where his mom had been a chef and his dad the lead architect for a string of luxury resorts on the island.
Over too many drinks we laughed, and danced, then stumbled back to my hotel room after a late-night ocean swim. It was one of those perfect nights, the kind that you think back to when life is getting you down. I’d been thinking about that night a lot lately.
Now, six years later, I should have been used to seeing that single line or the words Not Pregnant, but every time it caught me by surprise. We’d moved on long ago from the bottle of wine and legs up in the air while we giggled at the prospect of having just made a baby thing. Even though we were actively trying to get pregnant, we rarely had sex anymore. I missed having sex.
I had become an expert at answering the blistering and insensitive, though well-intentioned, “So when are you two going to have a baby?” question. No longer did I answer with the enthusiastic “We’re working on it!” response I used to give early on—now I simply offered, “Soon, we hope.” The assumption that Ben and I didn’t have a baby because we weren’t trying to have one really pissed me off.
God, we were trying so hard.
The knock on the bathroom door startled me, and the plastic test stick dropped from my hand.
“Hannah? Everything okay in there?”
I cleared my throat. “I’ll be right out.” I picked up the white plastic stick with its one dark blue line, and threw it harder than necessary into the trash can beside the toilet, jamming a balled-up handful of tissues on top of it. I had promised Ben I wouldn’t do a pregnancy test this time, would wait for the call from the doctor’s office with the official blood test results. But I was having a tough time kicking the habit.
A moment later I unlocked the door and stepped out into the hall, disappointed Ben wasn’t still standing there waiting for me even though I knew I would have been irritated if he had been. I found him in the kitchen, sitting at the island with a six-pack of Anchor Brewery beer and a bouquet of yellow tulips—two of my favorite things. My cell phone vibrated in my hand, and I glanced at the screen. “West Coast Fertility & Associates.” There was no point in answering it.
I started crying. Damn it.
“Hey, babe.” Ben jumped off his stool and wrapped his arms around me.
“Stupid hormones,” I blubbered, my face pressed into his chest. When I pulled back I saw a wet spot on the blue-and-white gingham-patterned cotton of his shirt, which I uselessly tried to blot with the sleeve of my cardigan.
Ben, his arms linked around my waist, leaned back and looked into my eyes. “Everything is going to be fine. You’ll see.”
I nodded.
“We’ll do in vitro next month, and I have a really good feeling about it,” he said.
I nodded again. “Thanks for the flowers,” I said, craning my head around him to look at the tulips on the counter. I didn’t want to talk about next month. Or IVF. “And the beer. I take it at least three of those are for me?”
Ben laughed. “Well, I figured you might need it,” he said. “And if not, I was prepared to drink the lot.” He winked and I stood on my tiptoes to kiss him.
“I love you, Ben Matthews.”
“I love you, too, Hannah Matthews.”
I extricated myself from his embrace. “Listen, I just need to go call Kate. You know how she frets.”
“I’m sure she can wait for one beer,” Ben said, cracking the lids on two bottles. “Here.”
“Thanks.” I took it from him, then picked up my phone. “I’ll be right back, okay?”
Ben nodded and took a sip from his bottle, settling in on the couch. I headed to the bedroom upstairs and shut the door, then put my phone and beer on the nightstand and picked up a pillow from the bed.
Covering my face with it, pressing so hard my knuckles dug into my cheekbones, I screamed into the four-hundred thread count Egyptian cotton pillowcase until my throat hurt and I had no air left.
4
KATE
“Don’t talk about the girls, or babies, or anything to do with eggs or sperm.” I grabbed the taco shells out of the pantry and arranged them on the cookie sheet before sliding it into the prewarmed oven. David stirred the simmering beef on the stove top, shaking in some extra chili flakes.
“How would I even bring eggs or sperm up?” he asked before blowing on a spoonful of beef and popping it into his mouth. He swore under his breath, then grabbed his glass beside the stove and took a large gulp of water.
“Is it spicy? Did you put in too many pepper flakes?” I asked, even though I had no business commenting on his cooking. I was—had always been—a horrific cook, something I blamed on my upbringing. My mom could make exactly five dishes—scalloped potatoes with ham, spinach frittata, pasta with red sauce, chicken enchiladas and turkey potpie. I had since learned, thanks to David, how to make from-scratch pancakes, roast chicken with potatoes and beans, and a decent Mediterranean bread salad, but all of us were happy he shouldered most of the cooking. “It’s temperature hot,” he said. “Spice is perfect.”
“I feel so guilty every time,” I said, sighing. I whirled the margarita mix in the blender with two cups of ice, yelling over the blender noise. “It was so easy. Like, you barely touched me easy. Why can’t it just work for them? One time.”
The doorbell rang just as I finished rimming the glasses with rock salt.
“Remember, it’s like nothing is different,” I said as I headed out of the kitchen.
“Got it. No eggs. No sperm. Nothing is different.” David scraped the beef into a large bowl and set it on the island beside the lazy Susan filled with tomato, onion, hot peppers, lettuce, salsa and cheese.
I opened the door, took one look at Hannah and immediately welled up.
“Shit, shit, shit!” I furiously wiped away the tears. While I was definitely the crier of the two of us, I had been determined not to shed a tear tonight. “I’m sorry. I suck.”
Hannah gave me a tissue from her pocket. “Thanks a lot. Now I owe Ben twenty bucks.”
“What?” I took the tissue. “You made a bet I’d cry?”
“I knew you’d cry,” Ben said, leaning in to kiss my cheek.
“I told him you would at least hold it together until after the first pitcher of margaritas.” Hannah handed me the bowl of her famous guacamole along with a large Tupperware container. “I’ve been stress baking,” she said, with a shrug. “Chocolate peanut-butter cupcakes.”
“Well, now that Katie has completely ruined the evening,” David said, wincing slightly when I smacked him in the arm. “Let me just say I’m really sorry, guys.” He shook Ben’s hand, clasping his other hand against Ben’s arm.
“Thanks, man,” Ben said. Hannah looked down, her long, blond ponytail falling to the side, and I could tell she was just holding it together.
“The margaritas are ready, and I’m putting an extra shot in yours tonight,” I said, grabbing her hands and pulling her with me to the kitchen. “Come on. It’s time to get drunk.” David walked behind Hannah and put his hands on her shoulders, squeezing them gently as we all moved into the kitchen. With their blond hair and similar height—David only a couple of inches taller than Hannah—we often joked I had married the male equivalent of my best friend.
“I think I need two extra shots,” Hannah said, taking a seat at the island and letting out a shaky breath.
“Done!” I freehand poured the tequila and we laughed.