Chapter 15: Willa's POV

Willa's POV

I got to the third stair before my knees stopped working.

Cal stayed in the kitchen doorway with his hands at his sides.

I sat down next to my son, in the dark, and put my arm around his small hot back.

"Who told you that, baby?"

"Nobody told me." Archie studied his bare toes. "I was on the stairs at lunch. Aunt Lyd walked out, and she was crying so hard."

"You heard the grown-ups."

"Only a little. The pastor's voice is loud."

I laughed, and it hurt.

Then I took a breath, and I did not tell him a fairy tale.

"I'm your mom," I said. "I was your mom the day you came, and I'll be your mom when you're a hundred."

"But I didn't come out of you."

"No."

"Did I come out of Aunt Lyd?"

I had rehearsed a hundred answers for this in six years, always in a daydream about a child of nine or ten.

None of them were any use to a boy in train pajamas.

"Yes," I said. "She carried you inside her for nine months, and then she couldn't keep you."

"Why?"

"It's a grown-up reason, and it's a bad one, and none of it was about you."

He thought about that with his whole face.

"Tell me when I came," he said. "The part with the car seat."

I had told him that story a hundred times.

I had never told it knowing the truth.

"You were three days old," I said. "Your daddy carried you up the front steps in a car seat, like a pumpkin."

"And I was crying?"

"Not even a little. You looked at me like you had been waiting a long time for me to get there."

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