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Not what she had planned.
Not what I’d planned either, for that matter.
One more sip, and she turned to me, her dark eyes unreadable. “Please, honey, don’t pin all your hopes on this boy.”
“Boy? He’s a twenty-two-year-old man, Mom.”
“Twenty-two is still a boy. He may look like a man, even act like a man, but inside, he’s still a boy, just like you’re still a girl.”
“I’m eighteen.”
“God, Daphne, that’s a baby, especially after…”
“After all I’ve been through. Yeah, I get it, Mom.” Now I kind of wanted some vodka myself, but drinking wasn’t the answer. It was never the answer, and my mother should know better.
“I don’t mean it that way,” she said. “I just mean… I wish you’d waited a little longer.”
“Why? How old were you when you had sex for the first time?”
It was a daring question. My mother and I didn’t discuss this kind of stuff. We used to, before junior year. She was always open to talking about boys and sex and my body when I had questions. Now, she seemed to clam up at the thought.
“That’s not really relevant.”
“Sure it is.”
She took another swallow. “If you must know, I was eighteen.”
I couldn’t help a slight scoff. “I see.”
“But I was different. I didn’t plan to marry the guy, and I didn’t…”
“Get pregnant?”
“No, I didn’t, and if I had, I would have—”
“Gotten an abortion? It wasn’t even legal then, Mom.”
“No, I wouldn’t have gotten an abortion, Daphne. I hate the thought of abortion for you or anyone. I would have seriously considered adoption, though.”
“I did seriously consider it, but Brad and I want this baby.”
She stayed silent for a few minutes and finished her drink. Then, “Just don’t pin all your hopes on this. If it doesn’t work out, Daddy and I will take care of you.”
“It will work out,” I said adamantly.
“But if it doesn’t,” she insisted, “we’re here for you. You can live at home this year and have the child. We’ll find a nice couple to adopt it, and you can start college next year. You’ll still have your scholarship, and you’ll only be a year behind. Everything will work out.”
“Why are you doing this, Mom? Why are you assuming Brad and I won’t work out?”
She didn’t answer again for a few minutes—a few minutes that dragged much like the minutes while I was waiting for Kathleen at the student health center to give me my pregnancy test results.
Finally, “You’ve only known him three weeks. You don’t know anything about him, and he doesn’t know anything about you.”
Ah. That was what she was getting at. “For your information, I told Brad the truth about junior year. He still loves me, and he still wants me. So there.”
Yeah, the “so there” was childish and immature from a woman about to become a wife and mother, but I couldn’t help myself.
Again, she was silent. Her arm trembled as she reached for the vodka bottle. I placed my hand over hers.
“Don’t, Mom. We’re going to be okay.”
“I hope so, honey. I truly do.” Her gaze seemed to go through me, as if she were seeking something she couldn’t see. “Your dad and your boyfriend will be gone awhile.”
“So? They’re getting to know each other.”
She nodded. “Yes. Getting to know each other.”
Her words skated over me in an eerie way.
As if they had some deeper meaning.
Chapter Three
Brad
“Okay,” I said. “What is it?”
Jonathan Wade stared down at the clear glass holding his Irish whiskey. “It’s about her junior year of high school.”
Was that all? He probably thought Daphne had told me the London lie. She had, at first, but she’d come clean before we made love.
“She told me.” I smiled. “I guess you brought me here for nothing.”
“What exactly did she tell you?”
“That she spent much of the year hospitalized for anxiety and depression, and that there’s a lot she doesn’t remember because of the medication she was on.”
“I see.”
“I’m okay with all of that. My mother spent some time in a facility herself. I understand a lot about what Daphne went through.”
“Oh? What happened to your mother?”
“Exhaustion, mostly. Neither she nor my father was ever the same after the accident that left her unable to have more kids. My father blamed her, and it wasn’t pretty. My mother broke down when I was in high school and spent nearly a year at a mental hospital, or a sanitarium as my father called it.”
My mother’s hospitalization had affected me more than I knew at the time. I got involved with the Future Lawmakers during that time, made decisions I now regretted. Looking back, I saw clearly how her absence had taken its toll.
“Does Daphne know this?”
I nodded. “When she told me her story, I told her my mother’s. It helped us both.”
“And how did you deal with your mother’s absence and your father’s…”
