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“Is he alive?”
She shakes her head slowly, watching me. “I need you to know that I loved him very much and he loved me. Probably sounds ridiculous to you, being that it was only six weeks, but a lot can happen in a short period of time.” My mind goes to Liam and I nod my head, understanding completely. “When I found out I was pregnant I was scared out of my mind, but I also knew he was a good person, a good man. Never in a million years did I think he would abandon me.”
We both look up when we hear knocking at the door. “Liam,” I say, realizing he left here a while ago.
“Hey,” he says. “Everything good here?”
“I’m sorry I left you out there wandering around.”
“Don’t be sorry. My hunk of rust hasanotheradmirer.” That earns him a smile from me. He reaches over and grazes his thumb over my cheek, studying my eyes, I think, to see if I’m drowning and in need of a save. Understanding passes between us, relief in his eyes before he shifts his gaze to Grace. “I guess Sienna described my car to her sister, and it turns out that her husband is a car buff.”
“Leo,” Grace says. “He’s a fan of all things motor-related.”
“Anyway, he lives just two blocks down. Is it ok if I take a quick walk over there to check out his garage?” He looks to me intently. “It’s just to give the two of you some time. I don’t have to go. It’s not important.”
“Go,” I wave him off. “We’re good.”
And once he’s gone, I sit back down, eager for her to jump right back into it. “So, he was deployed when you found out you were pregnant…”
“And I wrote to him, but,” she swallows, “he stopped writing back. I kept the faith for as long as I could, but I was crushed. I doubted everything we’d had, everything he’d said to me, every promise we’d made to one another.” Grace looks drained, as if the memory of that time still hurts her deep in her soul, while I’m hanging on every word, desperate to know how the story ends. “I wasn’t the next of kin. Officially, I was nothing.” She looks off into the distance. “It was months before I heard Damien had been killed in the line of duty.”
I feel my arms wrap around my own middle, my body rocking back and forth slowly as I absorb the blow. Grace comes to sit beside me on the couch and wraps one arm around my shoulder. “I’m so sorry to have to tell you that. And I’ve been sorry for years that I didn’t honor him by putting his name on the birth certificate. At the time it was more red tape than I was capable of handling. I had to supply a death certificate, which…I didn’t even know where to start.”
Shifting to face her, and maybe to break the gentle hold she has on me, I ask the one thing that Ineedto know, “Did you ever consider…keeping me?”
“After I gave you up, after it was done?AllI thought about was keeping you. For nearly eighteen years it’s felt like an ache that won’t ever go away. But at the time? I was devoting all of my energy to keeping everything a secret. I was nineteen when I found out I was pregnant, twenty when you were born…Not much older than you are now.”
I nod as I try to picture myself in the same predicament, but I can’t. I can’t imagine being so careless, I can’t imagine being so numb and thoughtless.
“I spent years being so angry at myself, looking back on that time and wondering why I was so weak. I wasn’t some poor kid raised in dire circumstances. I had family, I had friends I could have leaned on, I had financial resources. But I chose to go it alone, and I’ve paid for that decision every day since.”
“But it made your life a lot easier, didn’t it?” I don’t mean for it to come out sounding accusatory, but then again, maybe I do.
Her one-shouldered shrug is weak. “I was able to go back to school and finish my degree, I didn’t have to deal with my parents’ disappointment…So in some ways, yes, it definitely did.” She looks physically drained when she adds, “Fall classes started exactly two weeks after you were born, and my body didn’t get the memo that I wasn’t a new mother nursing her baby. It’s not something Mother Nature lets you forget. I had to wear a pad all the time that first month because I was rushing around campus in a daze, still bleeding, and I always had a stash of tissues on hand and a clean shirt stuffed in my bag in case my breasts started to leak.”
She stands up and walks a few paces. She’s not facing me, but I can see her hand go up to wipe at her eyes, and her voice sounds choked when she continues. “Not once did someone ask what was wrong. I’d just gone through the most colossal event a woman willeverexperience, yet the world kept on spinning as if nothing had happened.”
“Did you have a chance to change your mind?”
She turns back to face me. “I did. It may have been one month or three months or six. I couldn’t even tell you. I didn’t even read the fine print.”
“But you said you regretted it right after.”
“I don’t expect you to understand. It’s been years and I still don’t know if I fully understand. Looking back on it, I think the only way I could survive it was to cut myself off from my emotions. I turned on autopilot and cruised through my last two years of school, and then through the next ten years after that.”
Trying to wrap my head around it all, I get up and excuse myself to use the bathroom. I need a break from this, but at the same time, I know I may never get the answers I need if I don’t keep asking, pushing, listening. After today, this woman may never want to see me again.
And there’s a chance I’ll never want to see her.
Chapter Thirty
LIAM
I interrupt him mid-sentence. “Leo, I think I ought to be getting back. This has been amazing, really, but I need to go check on her.”
“Understood.” He shakes my hand, firm and with eye contact, same way my uncle shakes hands. Jeff has never shaken my hand, but I’d imagine his would either be flimsy, or the kind where you’re aiming to crush bones. “If you’re ever back this way, definitely stop in.” He looks to where his wife has appeared in the driveway. “No one wants to listen to me talk shop around here.”
“That’s a lie,” Skylar says, looking to me. “Olivia and I listen to him blather onallthe time. I can talk carburetors and pistons like nobody’s business.”
