The Secret She Kept by Cathryn Grant

Author:Cathryn Grant [Grant, Cathryn]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2022-12-12T16:00:00+00:00

When I told her I hadn’t had my period for three months, she never said anything about Mr. Monroe. She told me that God would not allow me to kill the baby growing inside me. I would stay home from school and have a tutor for my junior year of high school. If people found out about me being pregnant, it would ruin my life. Mr. and Mrs. Monroe and Cameron and Josh would not visit our home; she would visit them. She would tell everyone I had a particularly difficult case of mononucleosis.

She talked to her friends at St. Michael’s Catholic Church and found out about Lisa and Barry Fairchild, who would not only help deliver the baby, but would also adopt it. We would promise to never have any contact so the child would feel it was part of their family without any confusion about who its parents were.

This was for the best. Having a child in my life, having contact with that child would ruin my life. I was too young to care for a child, and all I would do was ruin the child’s life and my own. I should forget it ever happened.

So that’s what I tried to do. And I succeeded.

When Cameron asked me out the summer after I graduated from high school, the baby and the man who made me pregnant had become something that happened in a bad dream. A nightmare that I never talked about and mostly never thought about. Of course, I never said anything to Cameron about it.

How would he feel now if I told him? I had absolutely no idea. I’d wondered about it endlessly since Nadia told me she was my daughter. I’d lain awake at night imagining a hundred different conversations. I’d had dreams. I’d had nightmares. I’d relived that night with Mr. Monroe, and I’d relived my baby’s birth. I’d relived every moment of the fifteenth year of my life.

I’d had fresh waves of loathing for my mother, fresh waves and pain and feelings of being abandoned.

How could I ever tell Cameron? Would he understand how it had been for me? Would he be like my mother and blame me? Would he hate me for lying to him all these years? Or would he understand? I had absolutely no idea, and the not knowing terrified me. I was frozen. I felt like I’d become that vulnerable, hurting, confused fifteen-year-old girl all over again, and I wondered if I’d ever matured past that moment at all.

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