Total pages in book: 106
Estimated words: 101398 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 507(@200wpm)___ 406(@250wpm)___ 338(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 101398 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 507(@200wpm)___ 406(@250wpm)___ 338(@300wpm)
“Wait…our mother mentors young girls?” Josie’s eyes make a bid for her forehead. “What does that even mean? I have a hard time believing Eleanor was doing shit like that out of the goodness of her own heart.”
“She would just help them. Buy them new wardrobes. Find them jobs.” I shrugged. “In Alexis’s case, she took her under her wing, helped her secure finances for college and get an internship at King Financial as Thomas’s assistant.”
My sister lets out an exasperated breath. Like she can’t believe our mother would do anything to benefit another human being.
“Jose, I don’t know,” I whisper, and nausea makes my mouth fill with too much saliva. I have to fight hard to swallow against it. “I feel like there’s something big I’m missing here. Like there’s more to this than just Alexis.”
Josie’s eyebrows draw together. “What makes you say that?”
“The way she ended the letter.”
“What do you mean?” She glances between me and the letter. “I just read it, and I didn’t—”
“I know. Neither did I. Not the first time or even the first seven times I read it, but Josie, read it again.”
She shuffles the papers in her lap, looks down, and starts to read again.
Dear Norah,
I don’t know how to begin this letter. I don’t even really know what to say. Truthfully, I wasn’t going to say anything at all. I was going to stay silent and hide in the shadows and keep the truth to myself.
But I saw your wedding announcement in the newspaper.
Then I saw an article about you and Thomas and your happy life. It was an interview you did for Page Six. The photo of you and him gave the appearance that everything was bliss. And the journalist went on and on about what a beautiful couple the two of you are and how successful Thomas is and what a great man he is and how sweet and devoted you are to him.
I felt sick after reading it, and I just couldn’t keep the truth to myself.
I guess what makes this letter so hard is that you were always so kind to me. And what I did to you, whether you knew or not, was terrible.
What I’m about to tell you is going to make you feel awful and betrayed and probably a whole bunch of other emotions that you don’t deserve to feel.
God, Norah, I’m so sorry for what you’re about to read.
About three months into my position as Thomas’s assistant, we started an affair.
And it was a fully involved affair. It lasted for months. We slept together at the office. At your apartment when you were out of town on a girls’ trip. A few times, I even went on his business trips with him for the sole intention of continuing our affair.
He told me he loved me. He told me he wanted to marry me. He told me he was going to call things off with you soon. He told me a lot of things, but the day I found out I was pregnant with his child, everything changed.
When I told him about the baby, he became a different man. At one point, when I mentioned the possibility of telling you about the pregnancy, he got violent.
I look back on things now and realize how wrong I was about him. How wrong I was about myself. How wrong I was in what I did to you.
The day after I told Thomas I was pregnant, people showed up at my front door to talk to me. It was Thomas’s lawyer, your mother, and her lawyer. They were pretending to be nice but kept referring to the baby as “the situation that we need to deal with.”
This living, growing child inside my body was a situation to them. Not a human. Not a baby. But a problem they needed to fix.
In the moment, I didn’t fully comprehend that. I was mostly just in shock, and their manipulative words were clever in their delivery. They made me feel bad about myself. They made me feel like I was the one who created “this problem.” They even went as far as to tell me that the pregnancy would ruin my life. That I had so much potential, and if I stopped my life and career to raise a child, all of that potential would be lost.
My life would be lost.
They verbalized all the insecurities I was already having about being pregnant. It goes without saying that an eighteen-year-old girl who spent most of her life in and out of foster care is already thinking about those kinds of things. And it didn’t help that I trusted your mother so much. I mean, she had helped me with so many things. Helped me in ways that no one in my life had ever done before.