The room was silent except for her crying.
“And when the baby came,” she whispered, “and I saw that hair, I thought, I was right. I was right all along. She found someone else. I thought you’d done exactly what I always feared. And I was so angry. And so ashamed. I said that terrible thing, and I followed him out, and I’ve been sick about it every second since.”
I looked at the two of them. Mother and son. Sitting in my parents’ living room, wrecked and weeping.
I should have felt sorry for them. Maybe part of me did. But mostly I felt something cold and enormous, like I’d been standing in a house for six years and only just realized it had no floor.
“Six years,” I said quietly. “Do you know how many pregnancy tests I took? Seventy-one. I counted once. Seventy-one tests. Seventy-one times sitting on the edge of that bathtub.”
