Chapter 5 - The Secret Revealed
The secret of the baby sat between Lena and me like a bomb.
"I was seventeen," I said again, like repeating it would make it less terrible.
"I was stupid.
I was dating this guy who said he loved me.
I got pregnant.
I was so scared.
My mom had just died six months before.
Dad was working three jobs to keep the house.
I couldn’t tell him.
I couldn’t make him take care of another baby when he was already breaking his back for me.
So I went to a clinic in another city.
I had the baby.
A girl.
I signed the papers and I never looked back." My voice cracked.
"I never even held her.
They took her away immediately.
The social worker said it was better that way.
Less attachment.
Easier for everyone." Lena reached across the table and put her hand over mine.
"Sarah, you were a child yourself.
Grieving your mother.
Trying to do the right thing the only way you knew how.
That doesn’t make you a bad mother.
That makes you a human being who was dealt a terrible hand." "But Michael’s lawyer won’t see it that way," I said.
"He’ll stand in front of a jury and he’ll say—look at this woman.
She gave away her first child.
She abandoned her own flesh and blood.
Now she wants you to believe she’s suddenly Mother of the Year?
She’ll say I only had my son to trap Michael into marriage.
That I never wanted either of them." "Then we get ahead of it," Lena said.
"We tell the story our way.
We frame it as the most difficult, most loving choice a scared seventeen-year-old girl could make.
We find the adoption records.
We get the social worker who handled it to write an affidavit saying how thoughtful you were.
How you only wanted what was best for that baby.
And we make sure the jury hears it from us first—not as a gotcha from the defense." "And Dad?" I said.
"I never told him.
He’s going to hate me.
He’s going to wonder what else I’ve lied about." "Your father loves you," Lena said.
"He watched his daughter be beaten nearly to death and he still blames himself for not protecting you.
Finding out you carried this pain alone for twenty years?
He won’t hate you.
He’ll just wish you had let him carry it with you." I didn’t tell Dad that night.
I couldn’t.
May you like
Instead, I lay in bed and thought about the daughter I had never known.
She would be twenty now.
