"Lori was worried about Cal," he began. "If we went public, Cal would have lost it. He was already on thin ice with his temper, and his football scholarship was the only thing keeping him on track. Lori knew that if Cal found out she'd been with someone else, he'd do something stupid and blow the whole thing. She cared about him. Not the way she loved me, but she cared. She didn't want to be the reason his life fell apart."
The way he said "not the way she loved me" carried no arrogance. It was a fact, delivered plainly, the way someone might say the sky is blue or Tuesday comes after Monday. Ben believed him. Not because the words were convincing, but because the pain behind them was too old and too deep to be manufactured.
"I loved her," Ethan said, and his voice dropped to something barely audible, almost choked. "I know people say that abouthigh school, like it doesn't count because you're young. But I loved her. More than you can possibly imagine.”
Kelly's hands were trembling. Ben noticed because he'd been watching her peripherally, the way he'd been watching both of them since this conversation started. Her fingers shook where they gripped her forearms, a fine vibration that she was trying to hide by keeping her arms crossed.
"Ethan," she said, and there was a crack in her voice that she didn't bother to disguise. Her shoulders rose and fell with every breath. “Did you know she was pregnant?"
The silence that followed lasted maybe three seconds. It felt longer. Ethan's expression didn't change, which was itself the answer. A man hearing this for the first time would have reacted. Shock, confusion, something. Ethan's face remained still because this wasn't news to him. It was history.
"Yes," he said, his eyes now glittering with unshed tears. "I knew."
"The baby was yours," she said.
"Yes."
Ben felt the word land in his own chest. He thought about the timeline. The summer. The pregnancy. The fall. The murder.
"We had a plan," Ethan continued. His right hand came up to his tie, and his fingers began working the knot. Not loosening it. Just fidgeting, pulling at the fabric and releasing it, pulling and releasing. A nervous rhythm that he probably wasn't aware of. "I was going to delay college for a few years. Work on my uncle's farm downstate. We'd get married, live in my aunt's guest house until we could afford our own place. Raise the baby."
He paused. His fingers stopped moving on the tie.
"That was our plan, but—“ His voice caught, his words swallowed by a sob. “I talked to someone. I wanted to get some advice from someone older, but I couldn’t go to my parents. They would have freaked out. So I talked to my friend. He toldme I’d be crazy to drop out of college. I’d be blowing up my scholarship and my life.”
“He wanted you to go to college and leave Lori behind?” Ben asked.
Ethan scraped a hand down his face, his expression tortured by memories from the past.
“He said Lori should get an abortion or maybe give the baby up for adoption. I told him that we didn’t want to do that. I told him that I really loved Lori and that I wanted our baby, too. It wasn’t just her pushing me.”
“Did you tell Lori what he said?” Kelly asked.
“No, I didn’t. I thought about it a lot, hell, I didn’t sleep for almost a week. I couldn’t do it. I couldn’t leave her like that. I ended up telling him that I had made my decision, but he wasn’t happy. He said he would talk to Lori, but I told him not to. I was adamant about that. This wasn’t just her decision. It was mine. I wanted to marry her and have a family. College would be there a year or two later. I’d just delay it a little. He was livid and called me an idiot, but I wanted what I wanted. I wanted Lori. At that point, she was my whole world. Doing well in school wouldn’t have had any meaning without her. And of course, you know what happened. And it didn’t have any meaning. Nothing in my life has ever had meaning since. I still miss her. Nothing has been the same since she’s been gone.”
Ethan’s fingers curled into a fist at his side, then slowly released.
The tree's branches shifted above them in a breeze that hadn't been there a minute ago. The distant music from the reception changed, something slower, something with strings. Ben could hear laughter carrying across the garden, bright and careless, the sound of people who had no idea what was unfolding in the shadows at the edge of the property.
Ethan's face was filled with an old anguish, pain that he’d been carrying for a decade. Time hadn’t dulled his love for Lori.
Kelly’s hands were shaking, wrung together so tightly the knuckles were white.
"Did he talk to Lori? This person you went to for advice. Did he go to her despite what you said?"
Ethan's eyes shifted away from Kelly and fixed on something in the distance. The reception, maybe. Or nothing at all. The look of a man staring through the present into the past.
"No. I told him not to. I made him promise." His voice was flat, certain. "He wasn't happy about it, but he agreed. I told him to leave her alone.”
"All this time," Kelly whispered. Her voice had dropped so low that Ben had to lean slightly closer to hear her over the distant bass line from the DJ. "I had no idea. None."
The three words carried more than their weight. Ben watched them hit Kelly in real time. She was taking in the fact that her best friend had lived an entire secret life that summer, had fallen in love, had planned a future, and had never said a word.
Ethan turned back to face her. Something in his expression shifted from guarded to something closer to gentle.
"She wanted to tell you," he said, his shaking hands reaching out but then dropping to his sides. "God, she wanted to tell you so badly. But she was scared. We both were. You, Hannah, the whole group. We'd been sneaking around behind everyone's backs all summer. Cal thought she was his girlfriend. You all thought nothing had changed. And Lori kept saying, 'We're the bad guys. We're the ones doing something bad behind their backs. They’ll hate us.’”
Kids think that being rejected is the worst thing that could happen. Far from it.
