Chapter 19: Mom Makes the Call

The replies started before anyone had finished reading.

Bergstrom Family had thirty-one people in it.

Aunts, uncles, second cousins in Arizona, the pastor's wife, the neighbor who watered the lawn.

Within a minute there were hearts under Lacey's post.

Within two there was a message from an uncle in Fargo: Hannah?? Surely not.

"Oh, Lord," my aunt said, with her phone shaking in her hand.

Zelda held up hers.

Lacey had posted the same words on my clinic's page, and my manager had written under it: Hannah, call me.

My chest went cold and tight.

It was the thing I had feared all my life.

Everyone I knew was thinking the worst of me, in public, on Christmas Eve.

"Hannah," Emmett said, close to my ear. "Breathe. You don't have to answer it."

"I'm not going to."

"Good."

"I'm going to let somebody else."

I looked at my mother.

Mom had put down the phone.

She was staring at the family group, at the little round faces of everyone she'd ever told a story to, and her mouth was shaking.

Then she did something I had never seen her do.

She pushed back her chair, stood up at the head of her own table, and tapped the video call button.

"Mom, what are you doing?" Tobias said.

"Sit down," she said. "All of you."

The screen rang once.

Then, one at a time, the faces came in.

An uncle at his kitchen table, the pastor's wife in her robe, my cousin from Arizona with a paper crown on his head.

There were eleven of them, and then nineteen.

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