“Whose…” I stammered, looking up into my son’s tear-streaked face. “Ethan, what is happening? Who is this?”
“She’s mine,” he whispered. A single tear finally escaped, cutting a clean, pale line through the dried dirt and sweat on his cheek. “She’s mine, Mom. Her name is Lily.”
I sat back on my heels, the room tilting. My eighteen-year-old son. A father. Marcus’s blood, the dark voice in my head whispered, he’s going to run. He’s going to leave.
“And the mother?” I asked, my mind racing frantically through the girls at his high school, trying to place a pregnant teenager I had somehow missed.
“Chloe,” a weak, trembling voice echoed from the open doorway of the adjacent recovery room.
I turned around, still on my knees, and felt the floor drop out from under me entirely. Leaning heavily against the metal doorframe, pale as a ghost, her hair matted with sweat, and hooked to a rolling IV pole, was Chloe Harrington.
Everyone in Oakridge knew the Harringtons. They were local royalty. They owned the massive textile plant on the edge of town, the sprawling country club, and half the commercial real estate on Main Street. Chloe was their golden child. She was the fiercely intelligent captain of the debate team, the homecoming queen, the girl whose destiny at an Ivy League school was practically written in the stars since birth.
“I tried to hide it,” Chloe sobbed. Her knees buckled slightly, and she gripped the metal IV pole until her knuckles turned white, fighting to stay upright. “I wore oversized sweaters. I told my parents the doctor said I was just gaining weight from the stress of finals. I hid the sickness. But my water broke during AP History. The school called an ambulance… and the hospital called my mother.”
I stood up, my maternal instinct overriding my shock. I took a step toward the trembling girl, intending to help her back to bed. But before I could wrap my arms around her, a sound pierced the quiet of the ward.
It was the unmistakable, sharp, predatory clack-clack-clack of designer heels echoing down the linoleum hallway.
Eleanor Harrington rounded the corner. She was impeccably dressed in a tailored navy blazer and pearls, looking as though she had stepped out of a magazine rather than rushing to a hospital. She was flanked by a tall, severe-looking man in a grey suit who carried a leather briefcase—undoubtedly the family attorney, Mr. Sterling.
Eleanor didn’t look like a woman whose teenage daughter had just endured a traumatic, premature birth. She looked like a four-star general surveying a compromised, highly offensive battlefield. Her icy blue eyes, cold and aggressively calculating, swept over my dirt-stained son, lingered with intense disgust on the tiny baby in his arms, and finally settled on me. Her lip curled.
“Chloe,” Eleanor snapped. Her voice was entirely devoid of any maternal warmth; it was the crack of a whip. “Get your things. The driver has the car waiting downstairs.”
“Mom, please,” Chloe begged, shrinking back against the doorframe, tears freely rolling down her pale cheeks. “Look at her. Please, just look at my daughter.”
Eleanor didn’t even cast a glance at the pink bundle. “That is not your daughter. That is a colossal, filthy mistake that will ruin the rest of your life.” She gestured sharply to the man beside her. “Mr. Sterling has the paperwork drawn up. The state will take ward of the infant immediately upon your signature. It is a closed adoption. You are coming home, you are resting for the summer, and you are going to Yale in the fall exactly as planned.”
“I can’t just give her away!” Chloe cried out, her voice breaking.
Eleanor stepped forward, invading Chloe’s space, radiating a terrifying, quiet fury. “If you refuse,” she paused, letting the threat hang in the sterile, heavily air-conditioned air like a descending Guillotine, “you are no longer a Harrington. You will have nothing. I will freeze your accounts. I will cancel your tuition. You will not have a home, a car, or a family. You will be dead to us.”
The silence that followed was suffocating, broken only by the frantic beeping of the apnea monitor on Lily’s tiny chest. Chloe looked desperately at Ethan, then back at her mother’s unyielding, marble face. I could see the weight of the entire world bearing down on the frail girl’s shoulders, preparing to crush her.
