Finding Colin Firth: A Novel by Mia March Page B

she’d be dreaming of cannoli. She sat down on a bench outside the shop and found her attention going to the passing mothers. And babies. They were everywhere suddenly. Strollers. Babies in soft carriers strapped to mothers’ and fathers’ chests. Or in elaborate backpacklike contraptions. One mother wore her baby in a sling across her torso.
    They all had one thing in common, though. They all looked like they’d been doing it forever, this parenthood thing. Their faces were calm. The woman with the backpack stopped to window shop, another pushing a stroller paused to answer her phone, then went on pushing her stroller down the street as though taking care of a baby was no big deal. Gemma had to get a grip. Clearly, you could multitask. Clearly, she’d learn how to hold a baby and talk to someone at the same time. Mothers had been mothers since the dawn of time, for heaven’s sake. She could learn. She could talk to Isabel, who managed the Three Captains’ Inn, for advice on running a business and raising a baby. Isabel had a great nanny but she’d also said that June filled in for her often at the inn. Gemma’s sister, older by five years, lived in California and they weren’t close and never had been. Her sister ran cold, like their mother always had, and kept to herself.
    She was struck with a memory of being alone in her apartment as a child, having no idea where her mother was, unable to find her, her father gone, as usual on a business trip. Gemmawould go door-to-door in the apartment, looking for her mother, and if she came to a locked door, she knew she’d found her. Her mother had worked full-time as a professor, but she’d hired sitters to watch Gemma when she was young, and once she was old enough to be trusted with a key, Gemma would come home to an empty apartment, her sister busy with her own life. There had to be a happy medium, but heck if Gemma knew where or what it was. She just knew she’d never had that feeling friends had spoken about—the yearning to have a baby. Alexander often insisted it was because she was afraid, because of how she’d been raised, because she didn’t have a warm and fuzzy mother. He also insisted she’d be a great mom, that she was loving and kind and full of compassion and commitment, and that was all you needed to be a great mother.
    Gemma wasn’t so sure about that, though. You needed something else. Something more than all that combined. You had to want to be a mother in the first place.
    Out of nowhere, tears stung Gemma’s eyes because it felt so awful to think such a thing, given that there was a life growing inside her. A life, a quarter inch long, with a pipe-shape heart just beginning to beat, according to the week-by-week pregnancy book she’d started reading Friday night. Her baby. Alexander’s baby.
    Gemma put her hands on her stomach, wondering if she’d feel a flutter. Still nothing. Are you a boy or girl? she said silently to her belly. Will you have my straight light brown hair? Alexander’s sandy blond? His brown eyes? My dark blue? She wouldn’t mind if the baby inherited the Hendrickses’ cleft chin. And, yes, their pull-you-in warmth. Complain as she did about them, Mona and Artie Hendricks would be fantastic grandparents, thekind a kid dreamed of, doting and spoiling and full of hugs and love.
    A dog on a long leash came over and grabbed the cannoli out of Gemma’s hand. She’d only had two bites. The owner was full of apologies and said she’d go right in and get Gemma another cannoli, but Gemma smiled and opened the box and said she had extras, so no worries, that the dog had done her a favor, anyway.
    Thank goodness for cute, cannoli-swiping dogs to stop Gemma from thinking about her belly and how complicated her life—her head, really—seemed. She glanced at her watch. Time to head over to the Gazette. If she was lucky, Claire would assign her to cover the big story everyone in town was buzzing about—the film crew that had set