Suddenly, the man Mom had declared would never want me was not imaginary.
He was real.
He was engaged to me.
He wanted our child.
And his surname was the one surname capable of exposing exactly how shallow my parents’ judgment had been.
By lunchtime, Dad had called eleven times.
I finally answered the twelfth.
“Laura.” Relief flooded his voice.
“Thank God.”
“What do you need?”
“We need to talk.”
“You had that opportunity yesterday.”
“Your mother and I were shocked.”
“So was I.”
“You didn’t tell us who the father was.”
I closed my eyes.
There it was.
Not I’m sorry I called you a disgrace.
Not I’m sorry we put our pregnant daughter out of the house.
You didn’t tell us who the father was.
“I tried to speak,” I said.
“You decided you already knew everything.”
“We thought—”
“You thought he was nobody important.”
Dad went silent.
Michael, sitting beside me at the kitchen island, looked at the floor.
I continued.
“If Michael had been a teacher, would I still be welcome?”
“Laura, that isn’t fair.”
“If he worked construction?”
“That’s not what this is about.”
“If he had no famous last name at all?”
Another silence.
My throat tightened, but my voice stayed level.
“You didn’t throw me out because you knew something terrible about the father of my baby.
You threw me out because you didn’t know anything about him, and you decided that was enough.”
Dad tried again.
“We were worried about your future.”
“I came home with a Yale law degree and a job offer from a major Chicago firm.
You never asked about either one.”
He had no answer.
“And I was engaged,” I said.
“I told you that.
Mom laughed at me.”
In the background, I heard my mother say she wanted the phone.
A moment later she was speaking.
“Laura, please come home.”
“For what?”
“So we can fix this.”
“What changed since yesterday?”
She began to answer, then stopped.
I waited.
That silence told me more than an apology would have.
The only new fact was Michael’s last name.
I ended the call politely.
That afternoon, my sister came to the Hastings estate.
