Her words made me angry. Not because of their meaning, but because of their timing. She felt backed into a corner, and while she kept her mind locked away from me, she wanted me to unscrew mine and dump all of its contents onto the floor.
When she was the one that never showed up.
“Do you want to know what my parents did to me while I had to live with them under their roof while I was pregnant?” she asked.
I slowly turned around. “Maybe we should go into my room for—”
“Do you know what they did, Tanner?”
I clicked my tongue. “You already told me what they did, Summer.”
She shook her head. “No, I gave you the overview. I told you what happened and how they immediately stopped me from coming to see you.”
“I also know that they held a forced adoption over your head to—are you sure you want to do this in front of everyone?”
She shrugged. “I don’t have much to lose when it comes to you. I don’t care.”
“You have much more to lose than you think.”
Her eyes searched mine. “They forced me to go to church every Wednesday night and Sunday. At first, they prayed that something would happen to Cheyenne. That my body would reject the pregnancy or there would be some sort of life-altering ailment that would strike and render her lifeless.”
I blinked. “You’re joking?”
She shook her head as her eyes watered. “I’m really not. But once I got to my last trimester and they realized the pregnancy would be viable, they peddled me in front of families they thought would be good adoptive parents.”
I took a step toward her. “Seriously?”
She swallowed hard. “They went from telling no one to telling everything. They thought they could shame me into giving up our daughter. But I held firm. I held firm and I kept my head down and I kept trudging through my G.E.D. until—”
“Wait, wait, wait, wait,” I said as I closed the distance between us, “you dropped out of high school?”
She sniffled as she looked up into my eyes. “They pulled me out of school for my senior year completely. They didn’t want me walking around school while I was pregnant. You know, for their sake.”
I clenched my fists at my side. “Summer. I’m so, so—”
She held up her hand, silencing me in my tracks. “They used adoption to keep me in line, telling me that I’d never know my own daughter if I didn’t do everything they asked. They controlled what I ate and how much I ate because while my mother was hellbent in getting me to give our child up for adoption, my father was ‘thinking about my future.’ He made sure I took everything and did everything possible so that my body would go back to being normal and I’d be able to find me a ‘nice, quality man’ without looking like I’d torn my body into pieces to have a kid.”
I wanted to end both of their lives. “I’m so fucking sorry. I had absolutely no idea.”
She nodded. “And now you know how I feel. Now, I’m not the hypocrite in your eyes anymore. Now, it’s just you in the darkness, withholding all of the information on the premises that I don’t deserve it because I didn’t show up. So now, the ball’s in your court. You know why I didn’t show up. You know the hellscape I lived through before I got my G.E.D., packed up my shit, and ran. You officially have no reason to hold back anything from me or to view me like you view Brooks.”
Brooks cleared his throat. “Wait, what?”
I didn’t react though. All I did was stare into her eyes. “You’re right.”
She nodded. “You’re damn right I am. I usually am when it comes to us. And I’m telling you, Tanner, if I had any way of getting to you after your graduation so we could run off into the sunset together, I would have showed up. But at that point, I had our child to think about, and you know my parents always keep their promises.”
My eye twitched. “Yeah, I know.”
She wiped at her tears. “I wanted to know my baby, and that’s not a bad thing. I wanted that unconditional love, no matter what it cost me. And I knew that if I couldn’t have you, I’d at least have a part of you through our daughter. I never stopped loving you, Tanner. Not once. And no matter what happens to us now, I won’t have you walking through the rest of your life thinking I’m some heartless bitch who ruined your world. Because the truth of the matter is that my parents ruined both of our worlds.”
And she was fucking right about that.
