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“I had braces, but it wasn’t quite that bad.”
As I watched Erin’s smile wane, I felt the need to say something more. “I don’t want you to think it was easy for me to give you up. I agonized over it before and after. There hasn’t been a single day these past thirty years I haven’t thought about you and wondered if I did the right thing. I don’t know what kind of mother I would have been, or what kind of family you ended up with instead, but I wanted to believe you were better off without me. I hope I wasn’t wrong about that. I hope you were always safe and loved.”
Her expression softened into something that looked like compassion. “I was. I am. I had good parents and a good childhood. It all worked out okay.”
As I exhaled, a painful knot loosened in my diaphragm, one that had been there for so long I’d forgotten what it felt like to breathe without it. “I’m glad.”
“What about my birth father? Did he know about me?”
“I told him when I found out I was pregnant. But the decision was all mine.” Regardless of my feelings about Donal, I couldn’t cast the blame on him for something that had been my choice. If Erin harbored any resentment, it rightfully belonged to me and me alone.
She observed me in silence a moment, her expression inscrutable. “Were you in love?” she asked finally.
I hesitated, taken off guard by the question. I’d promised to tell her the truth, yet I wasn’t comfortable admitting I’d merely been Donal’s dirty little secret—and I wasn’t certain she wanted that level of detail. If she’d been hoping for a fairy tale about high school sweethearts, we weren’t it.
“We were friends all through school,” I told her, choosing my words carefully. “But it wasn’t until our senior year that…I guess you could say we got carried away, and for a little while we were more than friends. But there was never any possibility of us getting married and raising a baby together. No one would have been happy with that arrangement.”
Donal’s reproach the other night came back to me.You don’t have the slightest idea what I wanted or didn’t want. The resentment in his voice still mystified me—and pissed me off. He’d made it pretty clear he didn’t want anything to do with me or my inconvenient pregnancy. How dare he act as though he was the aggrieved party when I’d done him a favor by absolving him of responsibility?
“Will you tell me about him?” Erin asked, leaning forward in her seat, her eyes wide and hopeful. “What’s he like?”
CHAPTERSIX
DONAL
I’d been climbing the walls of my apartment all day, but I lasted all the way until seven o’clock before breaking down and calling Tess. Her meeting with Erin had been hours ago, and she hadn’t answered any of the texts I’d sent her. I was fed up with cooling my heels on the sidelines waiting for her to dole out the smallest crumbs of information.
“Hello?” Tess’s voice sounded muzzy when she answered the phone, like she was surprised to hear from me.
“You haven’t answered any of my texts.” I was too fired up with righteous indignation to care that I had no right to claim the moral high ground after I’d ignored her emails last week.
“I was going to call you tomorrow.”
I paced across my apartment, squeezing my phone in a white-knuckled grip. I’d practically worn a path in the carpet, I’d been pacing so much today. “Did you meet her?”
“Yes.”
I stopped pacing and sank down on the couch while I waited for Tess to elaborate. “Well?” I said impatiently when she didn’t. “How did it go?”
“Fine. It was fine.”
My jaw clenched as I tried to keep my annoyance in check. “That’s all I get?”
“Can we talk about this tomorrow?” Something about her tone sounded off. It was oddly quiet and lacked her usual edge of irritation.
“Is everything okay?”
“Yes, it’s fine. Everything went fine, and I’ll tell you all about it tomorrow.” The fact that she’d said the word “fine” four times in the last ten seconds didn’t do anything to put me at ease.
“Why can’t you tell me now?” I wasn’t letting her blow me off. Not when I’d been waiting all day to hear how the meetup had gone.
“Because I’m exhausted, and I’m not ready to talk about it yet.”
“Why not? What happened?”
“Nothing. Nothing happened. It was just…” I heard her suck in an unsteady breath. “It was a lot, okay? I need some time.Please.” Her voice, which had grown increasingly shaky, broke completely on the last word.
I stood up and ran a hand through my hair. “Can I come over and see you?”
