The senior trip after graduation was where I met Ethan. It was like lightning striking kindling. I fell for him so hard it was almost a death wish. And it was, in a way. It ended when he threw a positive pregnancy test in front of my father. “Mr. Albright,” he’d said, his voice cold and steady, “your daughter is pregnant. The child is mine. And I’m leaving her.” Just like that, Ethan Thorne vanished from my world. It turned out our entire relationship had been nothing but a means to avenge his first love. After that day, my father died. My mother lost her mind. Ten years later, I met Ethan again. 1 I’ve been drinking. Come get me. Got two friends with me. The text was from Marcus. Okay, I typed back, adding a string of hearts and kissing emojis. Marcus is in his forties, but his needs are still… intense. I had a feeling I wouldn’t be coming home tonight. After telling Leo to finish his homework and put himself to bed, I left. Leo is nine now. He’s a good boy. He can sleep at home alone, make his own breakfast, and get himself to school without me. I couldn’t find a parking spot near the hotel. Marcus’s phone was off. I had no choice but to park on the street and walk to the address he’d sent. I heard his booming voice before I even reached the entrance. “Stunning, right? Great body, never complains. Eight grand a month. Cleaner than a hooker, less hassle than a girlfriend. And she comes whenever I call, faster than an Uber.” I pretended I hadn’t heard him talking about me. “Marcus,” I said, my voice even. He spun around. Seeing me standing there, a flash of discomfort crossed his face. He cleared his throat and made the introductions. “This is my old friend, Ethan Thorne, and his fiancée, Rachel.” He gestured toward me. “And this is… my, uh… friend, Valerie Albright.” “A pleasure, Miss Albright.” Ethan shook my hand, his grip firm and polite. Rachel just snorted, her arms crossed tightly over her chest. The official girlfriends and wives—they always looked down on me. I never thought I’d see Ethan again in this lifetime. Ten years had stripped away his boyishness, replacing it with the polished confidence of a successful man. In those first few years, I used to fantasize about this moment every single day. How would I react? Would I be incandescent with rage? Would I hate him so much that I’d slap him, or sink my teeth into his flesh? But time and hardship have a way of sanding down all emotion. Seeing him again, all I could manage were two quiet words. “Hello.” 2 They had all been drinking heavily. The car filled with the sour stench of alcohol. On the way over, I’d already stopped to buy three bottles of yogurt drinks and some hangover pills. “See? My Valerie is so thoughtful,” Marcus boasted to Ethan. I’d been with Marcus for three years. He wasn’t a bad man, just had a big mouth. He owned a small advertising agency. He liked to call himself a CEO, but he wasn’t rolling in money. Being able to keep me for eight thousand a month was a point of pride for him. I didn’t see it as an insult. I never got angry about it. In the rearview mirror, I saw Rachel frown, her hand pressed against her stomach. At a red light, I handed her a disposable heat pack. “This might help.” It was only then that Ethan seemed to notice his fiancée’s discomfort. He asked her what was wrong, then had me stop at a pharmacy to buy her some medicine. Rachel’s house was the closest, so she was the first one out. Maybe it was the heat pack, but the initial hostility in her eyes was gone. She thanked me politely and said goodbye. She was pretty, the kind of girl you could tell was raised in a good family. The fact that we dropped her off in a gated community of civil servants’ homes only confirmed it. With just the three of us left in the car, Marcus started getting handsy. He was always like this after a few drinks, acting as if no one else could see, his hand creeping up my thigh. Ethan’s phone rang. “Yeah, I know. Okay, I’m on my way.” He hung up, his voice apologetic. “Marcus, my old man wants me to come over. Would you mind if your friend gave me a ride?” He seemed to know, with absolute certainty, that Marcus wouldn’t come along. When we reached Marcus’s apartment complex, he pulled me into a hug, his hands roaming over my body one last time. “I’ll make it up to you tomorrow,” he whispered in my ear, his hot breath making me flinch. I couldn’t tell if it was because of Marcus, or the impending solitude with Ethan. 3 On the way to Ethan’s family home, he was silent for so long I almost forgot he was in the back seat. The truth is, I knew where the old house was. We had once kissed in front of its ivy-covered iron gate, a desperate, breathless tangle of limbs. He had cupped my face in his hands. “Valerie, can you feel how much I like you?” If it was all an act, why were his eyes filled with starlight? It was a real loss to the world of theater that he hadn’t pursued a career on the stage. A soft chuckle came from the back seat. “Valerie, are you really this cheap? You graduated from a top-tier prep school. Go ask your classmates if any of them would be caught dead earning less than twenty grand a month. And you sell yourself for a measly eight?” I didn’t say anything. What was there to say? That thanks to him, my father, upon learning of my unwed pregnancy, had gone out drinking, stumbled into traffic, and been killed? That my mother, unable to bear the shock, had lost her mind? That I had never made it to my first day of college, my admission rescinded? He would be thrilled to know all that. He hated my family that much. I didn’t want to give him the satisfaction. When I didn’t respond, Ethan kicked the back of my seat. “Say something, damn it!” Fearing an accident, I pulled the car over to the side of the road. “Ethan,” I said, my voice weary, “what do you want me to say?” 4 The soft click of the door closing still woke Leo. I looked up to see him standing by his bedroom door, clutching a fruit knife, his small body tense and alert. A wave of sorrow washed over me. While I was beneath another man, while I was at the hospital with my mother, this was how my son spent his nights—alone and terrified. “Mom!” A smile broke across his face, and he rushed forward, wrapping his arms around my waist. For so long, I thought of Leo as the symbol of all my suffering. If my father hadn't died, my parents would have surely taken me to a clinic to end the pregnancy. But he was gone. Both my parents had lost their own parents early in life and had no siblings. If it hadn’t been for my father’s students, his funeral would have been a desolate affair. After the funeral, my mother started talking about suicide constantly. In her lucid moments, she would beat me, screaming that I was a shameless whore who had killed my father. Soon, her lucid moments became rarer. She ran out of the house and attacked a neighbor. We paid a hefty sum in medical bills, and with what little savings we had left, I admitted her to a psychiatric hospital. There, she was diagnosed with kidney failure. During a brief period of clarity, she learned of her diagnosis. Not wanting to be a burden, she threw herself from a window. She survived, but she was paralyzed from the waist down. There was no one to take me to get an abortion. Anyone reading my story up to this point would probably scoff. “She was eighteen, a legal adult. Couldn't she have gone by herself?” The me of today wants to scoff at the me of back then, too. But the truth is, I couldn’t. I was too scared. Before I met Ethan, the most embarrassing thing I had ever done was take off my shirt for a physical exam before my final exams. I didn’t know how to walk into a women’s clinic and tell a doctor I was pregnant. I couldn't imagine the look in their eyes. Would they hand me a form for a family member to sign? I had no family. On TV, miscarriages seemed so easy. A fall, a cold drink. I threw myself down the stairs, I punched my own stomach, I swallowed a whole bottle of herbal laxatives. Nothing worked. Every morning, I would tell myself, tomorrow. I’ll deal with it tomorrow. Those days passed in a blur of caring for my mother—feeding her, cleaning her, enduring her beatings and curses when she was lucid. I was miserable, but the days flew by. And so, Leo grew inside me. I was so thin the pregnancy barely showed. It wasn't until my father’s colleague, my high school homeroom teacher Mrs. Gable, came to visit my mother that anyone noticed. Mrs. Gable thought I was only five months along and was preparing to take me to a clinic. An examination revealed I was already eight months pregnant. Leo was born weighing only four pounds, small and fragile as a baby bird. Mrs. Gable cried. “Valerie, don’t you know? You’ve ruined your life.”
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