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“Lily, we can’t keep on like this.” She tried and failed to keep the quiver from her voice. “I miss you, honey, and I’m sorry this whole thing embarrassed you with your friends. I truly am, and I’ll do whatever you need me to do to rebuild trust. Just please talk to me.”
Her daughter stared at the white quartz countertop as if it held all the answers to her problems. Then she looked up at Rae, her eyes red from crying. “I don’t feel like I know you anymore. Like maybe I never knew you.”
“You do, honey. I’m still the same person.” Rae rushed to Lily, wrapping her arms around her. She felt a slight thrill when her daughter didn’t push her away. “I’m the same, but there are some things I need totell you about my life before you were born. And it’s so hard for me to tell you because I don’t want you to hurt or feel sad about it.”
Lily pulled back a little, tears coming down her pretty face. “I want you to tell me everything, Mom. No more lies.”
“No more lies. I promise.”
Rae prepared Lily some hot tea to go with her cookies, and they settled on the living room couch. She didn’t know how to start, so she started from the beginning, with her parents divorcing and her dad’s overdose. Then Clint sweeping her off to California for a new life when her mother wouldn’t take her in.
“Wait,” Lily said, “your mom wouldn’t let you live with her? Why?”
The confusion on Lily’s face pained Rae. She had no good way to explain it to her because she never understood it herself.
“My mother wasn’t a happy person, and she tried to have a different life with someone else. She got married to the last man she was cheating on my dad with.”
“Did she have kids with him?” Lily said.
After all these years, her chest tightened to think of it. “Yes, she had a daughter.”
“Have you ever met her?”
“Not in person,” Rae said. “We messaged a few times through Facebook a year ago when she moved to Texas. She’s a hard-core conservative like her dad and stopped messaging me after I posted about us going to the Pride parade last summer.”
Rae braced herself and continued with her story, knowing her daughter would have more tough questions for her. She told her about her time in California in the house near the ocean, but she tried not to go into the details of her abuse. She’d had many discussions with Lily about consent and what it looked like, and it was easier to tell her she was raped than to tell her all the other horrible things they did to her for their entertainment.
“So, that Clint person, he trafficked you and those other women in the house?” Lily’s eyes were wide, her oatmeal cookies and tea untouched.
“At the time, I didn’t know what it was called, but yes.”
She knew she needed to tell her about Beth and Katelyn, too—the hardest parts for her to talk about. Lily seemed to sense she was struggling to say more because she took her hand and said, “It’s okay, Mom.”
Rae took a few deep breaths and told Lily the rest. All of it, about how Clint accidentally killed Beth with an overdose, about Maria getting Katelyn before she died—whether an accidental overdose or not—and how Rae escaped with Katelyn after drugging Bobby, shooting Clint, and starting the fire.
Lily was quiet for a long time, and she knew her daughter was calculating the years. Then she asked the question Rae dreaded the most. “Were you pregnant with me when you escaped?”
Rae nodded.
“So, my biological dad wasn’t a one-night stand thing, like you told me?”
“No, honey.”
“Do you know who got you pregnant?”
Rae wanted to disappear into the couch. She’d promised no more lies, but she couldn’t bring herself to tell her daughter the truth. “I don’t, and maybe that’s a good thing.”
Lily’s mouth dropped open like she had more questions, but she said nothing.
“I know this is a lot to take in,” Rae said, which had to be the biggest understatement ever. “And I don’t want you to think for one second that you weren’t wanted because, honey, you saved me, and in a way, you also saved that little girl because I wouldn’t have had the strength to do what I did if it weren’t for wanting you to be safe.”
Lily’s eyes filled with anger, and Rae was afraid of what she was thinking.
“If your mom would’ve helped you, you wouldn’t have gone through all that.” Lily’s jaw tightened. “I hate her for it.”
Rae pulled her in close and held her. “If she had taken me in, you wouldn’t exist. I would go through it all again if it meant having you.”
“But what if the police ever find out about what you did? They’ll arrest you.”
