Page 12 of Letters to Lily

“Hey, momma!” I called out to her as I got out of the car. Her footsteps stuttered a moment when she saw my puffy face, but then she came and wrapped her arms around me tightly. “The kids are in the house, so if you need to spill your guts let’s do it quietly here, okay?” Her words were spoken softly in my ear.

“Momma,” I whispered. I was afraid she was about to be so disappointed in me.

“Shh, it’s okay, whatever it is, baby. We’ll get through it, and I promise I will be here for you.” That was my mom. She was always there to pick up the pieces.

“I’m pregnant mom. Kade,” my throat was clogging with emotion at the mention of his name. “He’s gone though. He doesn’t know, but I can’t find him.”

“What do you mean, he’s gone?”

She pulled me over to sit on the warm hood of my car, and I told her everything that happened over the past week. “Oh, my baby girl. I thought prom night was my biggest disappointment in that boy, but damn it, he just blew that straight out of the water. What in the world?”

It’s funny that my mom’s thoughts went back to that horrible night too. “I wish I knew, mom. I don’t know what to do.”

“Well, I know how you feel about these things, so I don’t think I have to ask what you want to do about the baby.” It was a statement not a question, but I answered anyway.

“I’m keeping the baby. I couldn’t… There’s no way…”

“I know. It’s okay. I told you, I would help.”

“We don’t have room here for all that,” a male voice spoke up just then. I hadn’t even seen my mom’s boyfriend, Jared, walk up. He had obviously been there long enough to overhear my tale of woe.

“Jared!” My mom snapped.

“No, it’s okay, mom. I already knew that.” I smiled at Jared to let him know there were no hard feelings about that. “I think I have a plan, but I could use a little help in another way.”

“You need help tracking him down?” Jared asked.

“No, I’m just going to give that a little bit of time. If worse comes to worse, I’ll hire someone to track him down and take him a message when the baby is born.”

“He needs to be held accountable for the baby, for the financial burden alone. It’s not cheap to have a child, but even before it ever gets here, the medical bills alone will start piling up. That shouldn’t just be on you.” Jared was a single dad, who took that position very seriously. His ex-wife had skipped town on him and their two kids, five years ago. He tried for a few years to track her down before giving up, and only then because he felt she would cause more harm than good if he ended up forcing her back in their lives.

“I know that, but I’m not going to force anyone to be in my life or my baby’s. I can handle it. I have a job at the coffee shop on campus for now, plus school, and well…” I turned to my mom. “I was hoping you would release at least a portion of my trust to me. I just want to be able to get into a small house instead of the apartment we’re in. It will be better for me while I’m pregnant, and definitely roomier with a baby. Kristin still wants to be my roommate, but we only have two bedrooms right now, and I’m not sure the apartment would let us stay there with a baby since it’s a student living type situation.”

“Are you sure you’ve tried everything to get a hold of Kaden?” My mom asked.

I pulled my phone out, pulled his contact info up, hit dial, and let her listen to the fact that his number was no longer in service. Then, I showed her the texts from Jason. She sucked in a breath when she read what Jason wrote. “I just,” her hand went to her mouth as she sighed. “I can’t believe everything turned out like this. I never would have thought…”

“Mom?” I questioned again. She looked up at me then. “Would you help me?” I watched as my mom looked to her boyfriend who nodded his head at her before he came over and swept me up off the hood of the car, wrapping me in a tight bear hug.

“She will, sweetie,” he spoke into my hair as he continued to hug me. “We’re both here if you need anything else too, especially a night out, because babies are a lot of work, and doing it on your own is going to be exhausting.”

“I’ll have it all taken care of this week,” My mom assured me. “How about we have some lunch, and then maybe go house hunting?” She smiled as she pulled me away from her boyfriend and into her own hug.

House hunting. That was something I didn’t think I would be doing until I graduated. Actually, that’s not entirely true. When Kade had brought up me moving in with him just a few short weeks ago, I had briefly envisioned the two of us going to look at places together. I stupidly though that we both needed to start fresh, as a couple, without any extra roommates or old memories tied to either of our apartments. Not that I didn’t love Kristin, or think that he didn’t love Jason, but I wanted us to experience being an adult couple together – alone. I definitely didn’t want to think about how many women may have slept in his bed before me, or taken a shower there, or any of the other horrible memories that assaulted me often when I was confronted by some of the women on campus he had been with before me.

Besides, if we wanted to get crazy after a date night and rip our clothes off on the way to the bedroom, or hell, have wild passionate sex on the couch, I wanted to be able to do that with him. I wanted the freedom to be an adult couple without the worry of a roommate crashing in.

My insides twisted again with the thought, because instead of getting to finally live out that particular fantasy, I was going to go house hunting with my mother. We would be trying to find a house that I could live in alone with my baby, as a single mother. Sure, Kristin was still planning on being my roommate, for now. Soon, though, she’d meet that special someone and start off on her own adult dreamland adventure. I would just be someone’s mom. Suddenly, the nightmare about my depressingly lonely prom night was starting to look like a walk in the park, because my future was looking bleaker and lonelier than ever.

Chapter 6

May 4

I spent the entirety of yesterday in bed. I’m not afraid to admit that my heart is simply crushed. Of all the people, in all the world, the last one I would have ever thought would cheat on me was Sasha. Hell, I never thought I’d ever see her cheat on anyone, but especially not me, considering she knew my family history. The other side of the coin was that I had to wonder if Jason actually told her where I was.

Maybe she thought I had left her? That question had actually rolled around in my head on more than a few occasions in the past week. The only reason I blew that excuse off was because Jason didn’t have room to lie. Obviously, I could check up and see if he’d actually talked to her for me. Well, I couldn’t do that since her number changed, and my busted phone meant I didn’t have a working number for her mom or Kristin. Jason couldn’t have known that though.

Kristin. That was another sore spot. I didn’t have her number or anything else, because we hadn’t spoken much since the night of our senior prom. She actually hit me when we watched Sasha crying in the car with her mom before they pulled off. “You did that too her,” she shouted at me. “If you have any kind of heart at all, you either need to make it painfully clear to her that you are only ever going to be friends, or you need to walk away from her and leave her alone.” I had no clue what she was talking about, because I wasn’t around Sasha enough to piss her off or upset her at all that night. Hell, the one time I was going to try to dance with her my date, Andrea, had stepped in the way and demanded the last dance for her. I was beyond disappointed that I didn’t get to dance with Sash, but she had no way of knowing that I had been about to ask her.

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