Page 67 of Love Me Boldly

The smartest thing I could do was leave without ripping open the rest of my secrets, but I was stuck in that booth.

“He’s…what? But…”

His confusion matched the same expression I wore for the first three months of Jonah’s existence. I swear, every day I walked around the trailer, bouncing him, rocking him, crying right along with him, and thinking…what? How is he mine? How did this happen?

Graham recovered quicker than most. “Your mom…she came back?”

“A few hours after I got back from your place that last night.” I was already spilling my secrets, might as well give him the rest. “She showed up high, practically tossed him at me, and then took off.”

Tears burned my eyes, but it was no longer in anger. It was sadness. It was pain, at how she never bothered to try to learn how great her little boy was. How smart he was and how sweet he could be. He’d slept with me until he was two, even though I’d gotten a crib for him and then a toddler bed, but he went straight from my bed to a full-size bed donated by someone to the women’s center.

My mom walked away from both of her kids, and while I might have been okay, Jonah was a gift. She’d never been sober long enough to realize what she had.

I no longer hated my mom. She lost her tools to care about anything but her next high years ago, and I’d spent enough time at a local Al-Anon to forgive her. But Jonah would someday ask questions. Someday he’d know the truth, and I despised the day I became the person who made him have all the questions I’d had when it came to our mother.

Across from me, Graham gaped in silence. I’d opened the honesty valve and couldn’t seem to shut it.

“It took me a few years to be able to adopt him, but I was awarded custody immediately. I had some help with that. There’s a women’s center in town that takes donations, teaches classes, and helps women with things like pregnancy tests. Trina, the owner of it, was there for me a lot in the beginning. The court had to give Mom time to show up and reclaim him, that kind of thing, but eventually, after she never came back or reached out or anything, enough time went by, and I was able to plead for her rights to be terminated. Now he’s mine.”

Graham’s gaping silence turned him into looking like a fish out of water, like words were forming in his throat, but he couldn’t find the right ones to say, so he kept stuffing them down.

“Anyway, it was hard. Ididgraduate but switched to mostly online classes. Caroline and Paul helped out a lot, but then, when I wanted to leave, it was too hard. The job market wasn’t great, every place I looked at was so expensive. Daycare costs absolutely blew my mind. I hadn’t planned for those.”

“And so you stayed.”

I tore at the napkin, the paper that had been wrapped around it. Those first couple of years had been the hardest. All my dreams went up in smoke, but I’d been given something—someone—so much better than I could have ever dreamed of, too. It was the strangest thing, feeling the loss of a life you’d fought for for so long, but loving the surprise that had come into your life.

“It wasn’t only the expenses,” I told him. “Caroline had a stroke when Jonah was two. She had a long, difficult recovery and still isn’t one hundred percent.” I glanced at him and felt embarrassment creep up my neck. “I never told you this, but this restaurant is half mine.”

“Really?” Two brows rose into perfect points on his forehead.

“Yeah. My grandparents put it in their will to Caroline and my mom. Mom left, and Caroline always hoped she’d return, but well, obviously you know how that turned out. After Jonah showed up, Caroline had a lawyer change the ownership from my mom to me. I couldn’t ever figure out how to leave Caroline after her stroke, leaving her with all the work of this place. And then there was Jonah…”

It’d been a perfect storm of changes that had leveled my last remaining hopes of freedom.

“So you stayed,” Graham said again. This time he wore a soft smile full of understanding. It was a look I knew well. A look I vividly remembered.

A look I was once certain I’d never see again and wasn’t sure I was thrilled to be doing so then.

“So I stayed.”

He looked out the window and blinked, running his three main fingers back and forth across his forehead. “You were here all this time. I looked for you. Icamehere looking for you. For weeks after. Banged down Tracey’s door so many times she almost had me arrested.”

“I know.”

“You knew.” He laughed, but it lacked the warmth all his old laughs used to have, and I cringed.

I was the cause of it this time. That didn’t surprise me. What surprised me was the devastation stamped all over him.

“I would have helped, Holly. I would have been here for you.”

“Sophie was still between us.” I shook my head. “You wouldn’t have.”

“No…Iwouldhave. You just wouldn’t let me be there for you. You didn’t even give me the chance.”

Sadness crept into my bones and my veins, making me cold. He was still so naive, but he hadn’t lived a life with whispers and gossip and people looking at you with disgust. Like you were poisoned because of who you came from. Those were mostly gone now. Enough time had passed that most locals seemed to have forgotten why I was alone in the first place, but there were a few that remained.

“I did what I thought was right at the time. You would have still left eventually, and I needed to learn how to do it on my own. And I did have help. Tracey and Caroline were lifesavers.”

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