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“I won’t do that,” I say fiercely. I’ll run away before I let her kill my child.
“You could put it up for adoption,” she suggests with a slight chuckle. It amuses her that I’ve made such a colossal mistake.
“No. I won’t do that.”
“What the fuck are you going to do with a child, Rowan?” She tilts her head. “Huh?”
I don’t know. But I do know that I’d rather struggle and have my baby than kill it or hand it over to strangers. Maybe it’s selfish of me, adoption would give the baby a better chance at a happy life, but I want to keep it.
I suddenly feel like I should’ve sucked it up and went to Trent. But my mom’s next words silence those thoughts.
“The way I see it,” she leans forward, “you have two options. Abortion or adoption. Ain’t no way you can raise a child, you’re too dumb for that.” I want to disagree with her and tell her that I basically take care of Ivy, but I know she’ll only have a well-thought out argument for that. “No way is that baby’s daddy going to help you. Teenage boys run from commitment, Rowan. And a baby? That’s a life sentence no boy wants.”
Was she right? She sounded like she was speaking from experience, and I’d basically deduced the same. Trent wouldn’t want to be a dad, and I had school to think about, and with a baby I’d need to get a job to buy it things, and what about college? I wanted to get out of here. A baby would keep me trapped in a life like this, a life just like my mom’s.
“How about this,” she smiled, and I let out a sigh of relief that she was going to help me, “I’ll adopt that baby. That way, you can go on and live your dreams, without a baby tying you down. I’m doing you a favor here, baby girl, take it or leave it.”
I thought it over for a few seconds.
“Deal.”
???
I wiped my face free of tears as the memory evaporated. I’d been so silly and naïve thinking my mom could fix the mess I had made. I wanted to believe that she was helping me.
She wasn’t though.
She was simply manipulating me.
I’d signed my life away when I put my signature on the adoption papers. She’d added stipulation after stipulation to the contract.
Basically, she wanted me to raise the baby, but he could never know I was his mother and I wasn’t allowed to speak a word to the father.
I wondered now, if she knew Trent was Tristan’s dad, if she would have been different because of the money they had. Knowing her, she might’ve tried to sell them the baby.
I never should have signed those papers.
I knew as soon as I did that I had made the biggest mistake of my life.
The contract stated that I couldn’t reveal to Tristan that I was his mother until he was eighteen, unless extenuating circumstances permitted it.
So, he’d become my brother, and eventually I started to believe it was true.
As long as Tristan didn’t know I was his mother, then Trent couldn’t know of his existence.
If I told Tristan that I was his mother before he turned eighteen, I wouldn’t be allowed to see him.
If I had gone to Trent in the very beginning, none of this would have ever happened. Hindsight was a pain in the ass. I had believed that Trent would be like every other teenage guy and not want anything to do with me or the baby. I knew that wasn’t true now. Trent wasn’t like other guys, seeing him with his nephew proved that. He would’ve owned his mistake—our mistake…and God, it killed me to even think of Tristan as a mistake. I loved that little boy with everything I had.
Now, I valued Tristan too much to tell him the truth. I couldn’t imagine not seeing my son every day, so I kept quiet, refusing to breach the contract, letting my guilt and misery eat me alive.
I had so many regrets, but my biggest was not telling Trent I was pregnant before I signed that contract. I’d believe he’d already hated me after the way I pushed him away, and it was believable to think that a sixteen-year-old guy wouldn’t want a baby.
“Rowan?”
I turned to look behind me and saw Ivy and Tristan standing in the doorway.
“It’s cold,” Ivy frowned, “and you’re getting wet. Come inside.”
