Completely Yours

Perfect – simply perfect. There was no other way to describe Nancy’s life, so why did she feel so uneasy about the day that had just begun.
Brian had already left for the office, Madison lay sleeping in the crib that Nancy leaned over ever-so lightly so not to wake her sleeping beauty and she had never felt so secure and at peace in her life.
So why the nagging anxiety that clung to the back of her mouth, that clouded everything she saw that morning? Walking back down the hallway and into her bedroom, all Nancy had to do was glance at the scrapbook lying at the foot of their king-sized poster bed to be reminded of what lay ahead of her in the next few hours.
She was finally coming – the child that Nancy could never have. The child that should have been hers. The child that Morgan didn’t deserve – the child that Morgan never appreciated.
Standing there, debating what to do next, her tattered sweatpants dragging on the floor, the unmade bed beckoning her to take another few minutes of welcomed sleep before she headed downstairs to truly begin her day, Nancy was truly torn as what to do next.
She needed to jump in the shower, put on her face and then head downstairs to clean up the mess that Brian always left behind him in the morning. Nancy loved him so much – and he had been such a blessing since they finally realized that they were meant to be together, but he was such a man.
No, Cassie wasn’t coming to inspect her kitchen, or to judge Nancy on the finer points of how to dress, but of all the appointments that she’d had, this was one that Nancy didn’t want to mess up.
What to do – her white teeth bit down slightly on her lower lip, her right hand played absently with one of her errant auburn strands, and her eyes studied the silent book laying on the end of the bed.
She really needed to shower, but...slowly, Nancy was pulled to the edge of the bed, where she plopped down and then scooted around until she was leaning against a stack of pillows, the scrapbook laying between her chest and the up drawn knees.
Was she really going to be at her house in a couple hours? Could she really be a senior in college? Wasn’t she born yesterday?
Cassie really did look like Morgan – dark brown eyes that lit up a room when she walked in. Her skin glowed and her smile was electric. That was Morgan to the tee, when they first met......

“Hey, are you Morgan?” Nancy stood in the doorway to their dorm room, suitcases in hand, her Mountain Dew ball cap sitting crossways on her head.
“You must be Nancy, welcome. We are going to have a great time.”
Studying her new roommate as she sat cross-legged on the bottom bed of the bunk beds they would share for the next ten months, Nancy had no idea just how much Morgan Haynes would change her life.
A three-sport, all-state athlete from Minneapolis, Morgan had torn up her knee over the summer and had lost her softball scholarship. She was beautiful, intelligent and not afraid to try anything. Life for Morgan was just one big game – one big rolling party and anyone she met needed to have just as much fun as she was having.
Nancy on the other hand, her life was anything but a party. Not that there was anything wrong with her life, but a straight A student from small-town Iowa; daughter to two very conservative, church-going parents, she never did anything wild or even the most remotely interesting.
Morgan had a different boyfriend, or as it turned out, a different girlfriend every other month in high school and since she had come to Iowa City. Not that Nancy quite knew all of that about her new roommate when she moved in – but over the next fifteen years, this outgoing, troubled and scared little girl wrapped up in an adult’s body, would become the single most important person she had ever met.
In time, she would become Nancy’s life. A life that revolved around taking care of the two most precious people in the world – the first person to ever love Nancy for who she was, and the little girl that she loved as much as if she had given birth to her herself.
But back in the half-made poster bed, covers pulled up over her knees, the scrapbook pages flipped slowly as Nancy studied each photo, the faces and places that they captured holding so many deep, unforgettable memories.
There was the picture of Morgan coloring her hair – more like squirting half the bottle in Nancy’s ear. It looked horrible – orange hair wasn’t exactly what she had been expecting when her new roommate decided she needed a new look.
Or there was the before and after shots of Nancy going in to get her ears pierced for the first time. Morgan really wanted them to go get matching tattoos, but needles had never been Nancy’s thing and nobody had ever seen that part of her body since she was a little girl in diapers, so pierced ears it was.
And on the trip back down memory lane continued, as picture after picture filled her heart and mind with emotions long since forgotten. Moments that made Nancy laugh and moments that made her brush away the occasional tear.
A pre-law major at the U of I, she was majoring in Political Science, while Morgan was a free-wheeling sociology major. Nancy never missed a class and never got worse than an A on any test or paper that she wrote. It had been that way all the way through school – valedictorian of her class and a National Merit Scholar to boot.
Her roommate on the other hand, well if she managed to get to half of her classes in a week’s time, Morgan was doing well. Even when she was playing softball, there never seemed to be any motivation to excel in her classes, unless it came to flirting with the guys in class.
How she had ever managed to get good enough grades in high school to qualify to get into the university, Nancy didn’t understand, not at first anyway. But over the weeks, that stretched into months, there was one thing that became obviously true, Morgan Haynes was no dummy.
She was actually one of the most intelligent people that Nancy had ever met, but somewhere in her life, it was as if Morgan had made a pact with herself that she would never appear to be that smart, not in public anyway.
No, she was beautiful, athletic and the life of the party, and that’s exactly who she wanted everyone to know her as. Pausing for a moment as she listened for Madison stirring down the hall, Nancy smiled at the odd couple that lived together for nearly half of their adult lives. What a pair – no two women ever became as close as she and Morgan did.
Glancing back at the book, her eyes fell on a picture of them water skiing on Coralville Lake, the summer before they graduated. Even after the terrible accident the summer before that cost Morgan her scholarship, she was a real daredevil when she got on the water.
They could barely coax Nancy to get on the skis before they actually got out onto the lake, let alone flying over some jump the way Morgan did. She knew that the knee always hurt like crazy when she did anything like that, but a little bit of pain wasn’t going to stop Morgan.
That’s what surprised everyone when she gave up her scholarship that fall. Yes she had to have ACL surgery and it would take several months of rehab before Morgan would be able to play again – play at the level that had earned her a starting spot as a freshman on a team that had actually challenged for the Big Ten title and landed them in the NCAA tournament.
It even surprised Nancy a bit at first, but that was until she came home one night from a lecture and found Ross in the room with Morgan. A senior from St. Louis, Ross had been seeing Morgan off and on for two years.