“She wasn’t taken.”
“They’re married.”
I opened the first letter with numb fingers.
“Liam, please don’t hate me. I changed in the car after prom. Hide the dress before Mom sees it. I know she’ll think the worst. But I chose this. I left.”
I read another letter.
“Hide the dress before Mom sees it.”
“Mitchell begged me to call her. He said, ‘Your mom loves you.’ I told him that’s the problem. She loves me like a locked door.”
John covered his mouth.
I opened another.
“Natalie answered the door in her robe at two in the morning a few weeks later. She saw me crying and didn’t ask whose fault it was. She just said, ‘Come inside, honey. We’ll figure out the morning when it gets here.'”
I wanted to hate Natalie.
Instead, shame burned my face.
John covered his mouth.
The sonogram was dated six weeks after prom. In the letter, Livia wrote that she had suspected before that night but had been too scared to take a test.
