Lily waited.
“You won’t love me anymore,” Morgan finally whispered.
“Oh, honey.” Lily kept her voice steady, even as terror grabbed at her with icy fingers. She bent closer, squeezing Morgan’s shoulders. “There’s nothing you could do to make me not love you. You’re my baby.”
At that declaration, Morgan started sobbing, crying so hard that her body shook.
“Whatever it is, it’s going to be okay,” Lily said calmly, even as a red film descended over her eyes. Had Brody done something? Had he hurt her daughter? Oh, she would kill him if he’d hurt Morgan. She would end him. She’d tear him apart with her bare hands. “I promise. I won’t be mad, and I won’t ever not love you.”
Morgan cried harder. Then she sat up, sniffling as she wiped her streaming eyes. “Brody…” she began.
Lily waited, making herself keep quiet, willing her body into stillness.
“He—he didn’t force me or anything. He didn’t hurt me, or, or…” Morgan grabbed a handful of her hair and started twisting, wrapping the strands around and around her hand as she stared down at the bedspread. Her voice was toneless and soft. “We only did it twice, and I didn’t even like it. And we used condoms. We were careful. Only…”
No, Lily thought. Oh, no.
“I got pregnant,” Morgan cried. Her body swayed toward Lily’s, like she wanted to rest her head on her mother’s shoulder, like she wanted Lily to hold her, but Lily couldn’t move, couldn’t speak. She sat, stunned and frozen, her body turned to a pillar of salt, like Lot’s wife, listening as Morgan sobbed and told the rest of it. The pregnancy test. Telling Olivia. The plan they’d made. The appointment at the clinic in Syracuse. What she’d done there, with Kayla and Andy’s connivance, the day before.
“Are you mad at me?” Morgan cried, the words barely intelligible. “Do you hate me?”
“Oh, honey. No. No. Of course I don’t.”
“And you can’t be mad at Andy or Mrs. Presser.” She’d raised her head and looked at Lily intently from her streaming eyes. “You can’t be. It’s not their fault.”
“I’m not,” said Lily. “I’m not angry at anyone. I just—” She breathed in slowly, her mind a whirling tangle. “I just wish you’d told me. I wish I’d been with you.”
“But it isn’t—but you don’t…” Morgan wiped at her eyes, then swiped at her nose with her sleeve and finally turned to look at her mother. “You think it’s murder,” she said, her voice very low.
Lily got up from the bed and went to the bathroom. She turned on the taps at the sink and ran the water until it got hot. She soaked a washcloth, collected a hand towel and a box of tissues, and sat next to her daughter on the bed. Gently, she used the warm, damp cloth to wipe Morgan’s face, the way she’d done when Morgan was little, sticky with chocolate or her favorite marmalade. Other kids liked grape jelly or strawberry jam on their toast or with their peanut butter sandwiches, but Morgan had always liked marmalade. You have a sophisticated palate, Don had told her, and Morgan had spent days repeating the phrase in her piping, little-girl voice: I have a sophisticating palate! Morgan’s narrow shoulders shook with sobs. Her eyes were squeezed shut, like she couldn’t even bring herself to look at Lily, and Lily felt shame snaking up her throat, as undeniable as the tide, as memory.
“I have something I need to tell you,” Lily said, and waited until Morgan opened her eyes and looked at her, before she drew a deep breath and began.
“When I was eighteen,” she began, “I had a boyfriend.”
* * *
Once upon a time, Lily Mackenzie had been Lily Lawrence. She had grown up in a small, rural town in central Pennsylvania, a town where the school district gave kids vacation on the first day of hunting season, where there were six churches and a Christian day school that sent three buses of students to Washington for the March for Life every January. Lily and her parents and her two older brothers had lived in a small Cape Cod–style house with three bedrooms and two bathrooms and a crabapple tree in the backyard.
During her last year of high school, Lily had grown three inches and two cup sizes, and convinced her mother to let her put golden highlights in her brown hair. Lily dabbed Calvin Klein’s Obsession behind her ears every morning and wore push-up bras to school, and the boys she’d known since kindergarten, the boys who’d ignored her in favor of her prettier, bolder friends, had started taking notice. So had her best friend Sharon’s older brother, Benjamin.