“Gabby, no…”
“Mom. I want to hear it. All of it. Right now.”
“Is he telling the truth?”
Devon looked at me. I nodded, because what else could I do?
We ended up in the living room. Kalen on the armchair. Devon on the arm of the couch beside me. Gabriella sat across from me.
The mantel clock sounded like a hammer.
“I’ve told her the basics,” I said, forcing the words out. “That I got pregnant senior year. That you left.”
We ended up in the living room.
“You told me he didn’t want me,” Gabriella said.
“I told you it was complicated.”
“That’s not what I heard, Mom.”
Kalen leaned forward, elbows on his knees, and I watched him arrange his face into something soft.
“Gabriella,” he said, “I need you to know I didn’t leave because I didn’t want you. There’s a reason I disappeared. Your mother knows. She’s always known.”
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“That’s not what I heard.”
“Don’t you dare,” I said.
“Then tell her.”
“Don’t push me, Kalen.”
“Tell her, Mara, or I will, and I promise you, my version has receipts.”
Gabriella turned to me. Her eyes were wet, and I hadn’t even started yet.
“Mom. What is he talking about?”
Devon’s hand found mine and squeezed once.
I opened my mouth finally to say the thing I had swallowed for years.
“Don’t push me.”
But Kalen was faster.
“I was 17 when your mom fell pregnant. My father, Richard, was a hard man. The kind of man who cared more about the family name than his own son.”
My ex-boyfriend sat forward on the edge of the armchair as if he’d been waiting years to say that.
Gabriella didn’t look at me. She looked at him.
My ex-boyfriend sat forward.
“My father put me on a plane the same week. Boarding school in Switzerland. He took my phone. He told me your mother had taken the money and moved on with her life.”
Kalen reached into a folder on his lap and pulled out a small stack of yellowed envelopes.
“I found these last month in his storage unit after he passed. Letters your mom wrote to me at his address. He kept them.”
Gabriella picked one up as if it might crumble.
“He took my phone.”
“You wrote him?” my daughter asked.
“For almost a year,” I answered. “I got his father’s address from a neighbor. I also called every number I got from mutual friends. Until the numbers stopped working and the letters started coming back.”
“But you stopped,” Gabriella said. “Why did you stop, Mom?”
I couldn’t answer that.
“You wrote him?”
Kalen tilted his head.
“That’s a good question, actually. Why did you stop? Gabriella could have found me herself.”
“Don’t,” I said quietly.
“You never even gave her a chance.”
“Don’t do that.”
Devon shifted forward on the couch. “Kalen, that’s enough.”
“Don’t do that.”
“I have a right to ask,” Kalen said. “I lost 18 years.”
Gabriella turned to me then, and she was crying and furious in a way I’d never seen.
“Mom. Why didn’t you keep looking? Why didn’t you tell me the truth?”
Something inside me snapped.
“Because your grandfather came back one more time.”
The room became very quiet.
“I have a right to ask.”
