At three in the morning, feeding Evelyn in the rocking chair again, I thought about all of it.
I thought about the six years. All those months of shame. That word, unexplained, sitting on my chest like a stone.
It had never been unexplained. Not to him. Not to Diane. They had the explanation the whole time. They just kept it in a drawer and let me carry the weight.
And then I thought about Ben at nineteen. A scared college kid, sick and bald from chemo, lying in a hospital bed while his father packed a suitcase. Being told he’d never have children. His mother, terrified and abandoned and furious, saying: never tell anyone. Never let anyone see the broken part of you, or they’ll leave.
I didn’t want to feel sorry for that boy. But I did.
That was the worst part. I couldn’t just hate him. It would have been so much easier if I could.
My mom came in at three-thirty and sat on the bed, like the night before.
“I’m so angry, Mom,” I said into the dark. “I’m so angry I can’t breathe.”
“I know.”
“He made me think I was broken. For six years.”
“I know, honey.”
“And when the one thing I ever wanted finally came, he made me think I’d done something terrible. He made Evie into a… into evidence. Into proof that I’m a liar. She was three minutes old.”
My mom didn’t say anything for a while.
“What do you want to do?” she finally asked.
“I don’t know.”
“You don’t have to know tonight.”
“Do you think I should forgive him?”
My mom sighed. She was quiet for so long I thought she wasn’t going to answer.
“I think,” she said finally, “that forgiveness isn’t one thing. It’s not a door you walk through once. It’s more like a road. And you don’t have to decide tonight if you’re going to walk down it. You don’t ever have to walk down it at all, if you don’t want to. That’s your choice. Nobody else’s. Not his. Not mine.”
