I drove the forty minutes back to Willow Creek with a cold dread coiling in my gut. When I pushed through the front door, the house was suffocatingly silent. Rita was anchored to the kitchen table, staring blankly at a mug of chamomile tea that had stopped steaming an hour ago. Gerald stood paralyzed by the refrigerator, his arms crossed, his gaze drilled into a scuff mark on the linoleum. From the floor above, I could hear the muffled, rhythmic sound of Vanessa sobbing into her mattress.
Rita didn’t lift her eyes when I pulled out a chair. Her hand, trembling slightly, slid a crumpled piece of thermal paper across the polished wood.
An ultrasound printout.
Four months. My sixteen-year-old sister had been carrying a secret for a third of a year, entirely alone. Tyler, I would later learn, had already peeled his Mustang out of her life the moment the plastic wand showed two pink lines.
But my mother’s first words weren’t about Vanessa’s terror. They weren’t about the baby’s health or the boy who had vanished.
“The neighbors cannot know,” Rita whispered, her voice brittle as dry leaves.
I remember the oppressive ticking of the wall clock. It was exactly eleven minutes past two. The neighbors. Rita laid out her battle plan with the cold precision of a military tactician. Adoption was the logical route, she mused, but an agency required legal filings, home visits, a paper trail. A paper trail meant whispers at the Methodist church. Keeping the infant was out of the question.
“It would ruin everything we have built,” Rita declared, her jaw locked tight, as if she had constructed an empire rather than a three-bedroom colonial and a country club membership.
She stood up abruptly, marched to the hallway linen closet, and returned with a small square of fabric. It was a baby blanket. Yellow cotton, threadbare at the corners, faded from two decades of dark storage.
“This was yours,” Rita said, shoving it into my hands.
It felt impossibly thin. It smelled of cedar wood and forgotten history. Rita sat back down and finally locked her icy blue eyes onto mine.
“You have to help,” she demanded. “You are her sister. If we keep it in the family, Vanessa can go back to school. We never have to speak of this mistake again.”
A mistake. “What about Vanessa?” I asked, my voice cracking in the sterile kitchen air. “Does she want to keep it?”
Rita waved her hand, swatting the question away like a gnat. “Vanessa is a child. She has no idea what she wants.”
