She had no idea, sitting there, that the hardest and best years of her life were both about to begin at once.

Chapter 2 — Who’s the Father

“Who’s the father?” my father asked.

His voice was very quiet, which was somehow worse than shouting would have been.

I swallowed hard.

“I can’t tell you,” I said.

The silence that followed had a texture to it, dense and total.

“What do you mean you can’t tell us?” Eleanor’s voice cracked like a whip across the quiet.

“Are you covering for someone, Evelyn?

Is he married?

Is he twice your age?

What could possibly be so terrible that you can’t say his name in your own house?” I understand now, looking back, that my mother’s fear that night was not cruelty either, though it felt like it at the time.

She was a mother watching her nineteen-year-old daughter walk into something she could not see the edges of, and her mind was running to the worst places a mother’s mind runs.

She was not trying to shame me.