The problem with fixing one thing was that it made the other things worse.
My father acknowledged the child in a small legal document that Bethany accepted. She stopped threatening to go public. But the Halloways had already pulled out, and the rumors had already spread, and my mother's friends had already started calling less. The damage was done.
The family name was still intact on paper. But people talk. People always talk.
I was sitting in my old bedroom, in my childhood room with its pale pink walls and its shelf of books I had read a hundred times, when I found the letters.
I don't know why I opened the drawer. I was looking for a sweater, something I had left behind, something I could wear in the cold house. But the drawer was full of envelopes. Dozens of them. Addressed to me.
