‘And what do you do for a living?’ Kate asked.
‘I write and illustrate children’s books.’
‘Oh, that’s so wonderful!’
Kate was thrilled she was creative. That had been one of the things she had worried about: that her more artistic genes would not be passed on to the baby.
‘Thank you! I mean, it’s not like I’m Roald Dahl or anything. I get commissions from parents or family members to write personalised fairytales for their children.’
‘How does that work?’
Marisa flicked her hair back over her shoulders. It was long and wavy, the kind of hair you see on models advertising suntan lotion on the beach.
‘They send me a couple of photos and some key characteristics and I go from there.’
She told them she called her business Telling Tales and they both commended her on the cleverness of the name. Under the table, Jake grazed his knee against Kate’s and she clasped onto his thigh, not quite believing that this was going as well as it was.
They didn’t mention the surrogacy until they had finished their drinks and it was Marisa who brought it up.
‘I know that we’re at the very early stages of this, but I just wanted to put it out there that I really like you guys and would love to be able to help you by being your surrogate. If you wanted that, of course.’ She giggled and her face flushed. ‘No pressure!’
Kate’s eyes filled with tears.
‘That’s such a—’ Her voice broke. ‘Such a generous and incredible thing to hear. Thank you. Excuse me.’
She didn’t want to cry in front of Marisa, so she made her way to the toilet, where she put the loo seat down and sat there for a few minutes, blotting at her cheeks with balled-up loo roll. She took some deep breaths. There was a sign on the back of the door for baby yoga.
‘Unleash your inner mama goddess,’ it read and there was a photograph of a broad-hipped woman in a kaftan holding a chubby baby up to the sky. Kate had seen the poster before and it had always enraged her. It seemed so smug, so tone-deaf, so badly misaligned with what she was going through that she had to stop herself from tearing it down. It was like those posts on Instagram of photogenic baby bumps and minuscule newborns that made Kate want to scream and wish there was a trigger warning for pregnancy content. But today, she stared at the poster and believed that one day this could be her.
She fished out her phone from her jeans pocket and texted Jake.
‘I think she’s the one, don’t you?’
She pressed send and waited. There was a rattling at the door, so she flushed the loo and washed her hands, placing them under the dryer so that the person outside knew there wasn’t long to wait. Her phone vibrated.
‘Sure do x’
Kate left the cubicle, grinning broadly at the woman waiting outside.
‘Sorry,’ she murmured. It was as she was walking back through the bustling cafe that she saw, in the flicker of a moment, Marisa reach out across the table and graze Jake’s wrist with her hand. It was a quick gesture, as if to emphasise a conversational point, and Kate thought no more about it as she went back to her seat and told Marisa how lucky they felt to have met her.
20
They spent a lot of time togetherover the next three months, as advised by Carol. They went for picnics. They attended surrogacy conferences. They visited art galleries and museums and went on cinema dates, where Jake and Kate would sit either side of Marisa so as not to make her feel awkward. They had dozens of conversations about what the surrogacy would entail and how they would make it work so that they were all three of them as clear as they could be. They thrashed out a surrogacy agreement between the three of them, whereby Marisa Grover would transfer legal parenthood to Kate Samuel and Jake Sturridge after their baby was born. Marisa always referred to it as ‘your baby’. She knew all about the medical procedures that she would have to undergo to have her eggs retrieved and fertilised with Jake’s sperm and reassured Kate that she wasn’t daunted by the prospect.
‘I just want to make sure you’re OK with it all. Sorry for all the questions,’ Kate said one evening when the three of them were walking along the river, through Battersea Park.
‘Oh gosh, I totally understand,’ Marisa replied. ‘But I guess I did think long and hard about wanting to do this before I met you, so I think I do know what I’m getting into.’
‘That’s good to hear,’ Jake said.
Everything Marisa told them was perfect. It felt, at points, as though they had invented her, as though she were too good to be true.
There was just one thing that Kate wanted to change, and that was Marisa’s living arrangement. She had told them she rented a flat in north London, but when they visited her there Kate was taken aback to find that it was more like a bedsit than a flat. The bedroom containedthe galley kitchen and the bathroom was barely bigger than a cupboard. It smelled of cooked food and bad plumbing. Kate could hear the thump of loud music coming from above. It was damp and poky and the front window looked out directly onto a main road. The glass was grimy from exhaust fumes.
‘What if Marisa came to live with us?’ Kate asked Jake later that evening. They were sitting on the sofa in front of the TV, drinking wine and watching a Netflix documentary about the doping scandal in cycling.
‘Mmm?’ Jake didn’t hear her at first. He reached for the remote control and pressed pause. ‘What was that?’
