Chapter 7: What My Mother Said When No One Else Was in the Room
My father signed the agreement.
He didn't look at me when he did it.
He picked up the pen, pressed it to the paper, and signed his name in the slow, deliberate way he signed everything — like each letter cost him something.
Then he set the pen down and walked out of the living room without a word.
Caleb signed after him.
He handed the paper back to me and said, "I'll start the first payment next week." Nothing else.
Andrew took the signed agreement and folded it carefully into the bag.
My mother hadn't moved from her chair.
"I'll get some water," Andrew said, and he disappeared into the kitchen.
He was giving us the room.
I knew it immediately, and I was grateful for it and terrified of it at the same time.
My mother looked at her hands in her lap.
"I want to tell you about Raymond," she said.
"Mom, you don't have to—"
"I want to." She looked up.
Her eyes were dry.
She had already cried everything she had, it seemed, before I arrived.
"I was twenty-three.
He was charming and certain about everything, the way young men sometimes are.
We were together for almost two years.
When I found out I was pregnant, he told me he wasn't ready.
He said it very calmly, like he was turning down a job offer." She folded her hands.
"He left the state.
I didn't hear from him again until a letter arrived from Hargrove and Sills, eleven years ago."
I sat very still.
"He'd been diagnosed with something serious.
He had time to think, apparently.
Time to feel things he hadn't felt when he was young and certain." She paused.
"He left you everything he had, Lena.
The letter said he thought about you often.
That he hoped you'd had a good life.
That he was sorry."
"And you contested the will."
"Your father did.
I — I didn't stop him." She looked at the window.
"I told myself it was because Raymond had no right.
That he'd forfeited any claim to you the moment he walked away.
But the truth is I was afraid."
"Of what?"
"That you'd find out I had kept him from you.
That you'd want to know him, even through his memory.
That you'd feel something for him that you'd never felt for your father, and your father would—" She stopped.
"Would what?"
"Would feel like he hadn't been enough." Her voice was very quiet.
"He adopted you legally when you were two.
He has loved you every day since then.
But he has always known, somewhere, that he was second.
And I was afraid of what knowing about Raymond would do to that."
I looked at my mother.
At the blue cardigan.
At the hands folded in her lap.
"So you spent the money," I said.
"To make it disappear."
"To make him disappear.
Yes." She met my eyes.
"It was wrong.
I knew it was wrong while we were doing it.
I have known it every day since."
"Why didn't you tell me?
Even later.
Even last year."
"Because every year that passed made it worse.
Every year made it harder to find the right moment and easier to believe you'd never find out." She looked down again.
"And then you found out."
The kitchen was quiet.
I could hear Andrew moving carefully, giving us as much time as we needed.
"I'm not ready to forgive you," I said.
"I need you to know that."
"I know."
"But I understand what you were afraid of.
I don't think it was right.
I think you should have trusted me.
But I understand it."
My mother's breath came out in a long, unsteady line.
"Your father loves you," she said.
"The man in the other room.
He is your father in every way that matters."
"I know that too," I said.
"That part was never in question."
She nodded.
She pressed her lips together.
May you like
She did not cry again.
We sat together in the quiet living room until Andrew came back with three glasses of water and set them on the table between us, and none of us said anything for a little while, and somehow that was exactly right.
