“She threatened to get Dad fired when my parents were already barely surviving. My sister was about to marry a good man, and Ruth threatened to destroy her reputation.”
“She couldn’t have done that.”
Anna held my gaze.
“Couldn’t she?”
I had no answer.
Everyone in Millfield listened to Ruth.
“My mother,” I whispered. “My mother taught Sunday school.”
“Your mother had power,” Anna said softly. “And she used it on a twenty-year-old girl whose family had nothing.”
“So the letter you sent me—the one saying you couldn’t handle the distance…”
“I wrote it that night. I cried the whole way through it.”
I stared down at the coffee between my hands.
“What happened afterward? Did you marry?”
Anna shook her head.
“No.”
“Children?”
“No. There was never anyone else I could imagine that life with.”
Forty years suddenly felt much longer.
For all that time, I’d believed Anna simply hadn’t loved me enough.
“Why didn’t you come to me? Even after you left?”
Anna lowered her eyes to her hands.
“I found out I was pregnant three weeks later.”
I stared at her.
“What?”
“I was pregnant, Walter.”
The room seemed to shift beneath me.
A child.
Mine and Anna’s.
For forty years, I’d believed I’d lost only her.
“You were carrying MY CHILD?”
“Yes.”
“What happened to the baby?”
Anna turned away.
“I gave her up.”
“Why?”
“I was twenty, alone, and terrified. Your mother had convinced me you didn’t want me anymore. She said the baby would have a better life with a family who could give her what I couldn’t.”
“And you believed her?”
“I didn’t think I had another choice.”
My chest tightened.
“Where is she now?”
“I don’t know.”
I thought that was the revelation that would change everything.
I didn’t realize Anna had barely begun.
“You never tried to tell me?”
“I tried. I went to your mother’s house. I thought the baby might make her accept us and help me reach you.”
“What happened?”
“Ruth wouldn’t give me your number. She reminded me what would happen to my family if I contacted you.”
“That’s why you disappeared?”
“That—and what she told me next.”
“What?”
“That you’d already moved on.”
