Eleanor Harrington rounded the corner. She was impeccably dressed in a tailored navy blazer and pearls, looking as though she had stepped out of a magazine rather than rushing to a hospital. She was flanked by a tall, severe-looking man in a grey suit who carried a leather briefcase—undoubtedly the family attorney, Mr. Sterling.
Eleanor didn’t look like a woman whose teenage daughter had just endured a traumatic, premature birth. She looked like a four-star general surveying a compromised, highly offensive battlefield. Her icy blue eyes, cold and aggressively calculating, swept over my dirt-stained son, lingered with intense disgust on the tiny baby in his arms, and finally settled on me. Her lip curled.
“Chloe,” Eleanor snapped. Her voice was entirely devoid of any maternal warmth; it was the crack of a whip. “Get your things. The driver has the car waiting downstairs.”
“Mom, please,” Chloe begged, shrinking back against the doorframe, tears freely rolling down her pale cheeks. “Look at her. Please, just look at my daughter.”
Eleanor didn’t even cast a glance at the pink bundle. “That is not your daughter. That is a colossal, filthy mistake that will ruin the rest of your life.” She gestured sharply to the man beside her. “Mr. Sterling has the paperwork drawn up. The state will take ward of the infant immediately upon your signature. It is a closed adoption. You are coming home, you are resting for the summer, and you are going to Yale in the fall exactly as planned.”
“I can’t just give her away!” Chloe cried out, her voice breaking.
Eleanor stepped forward, invading Chloe’s space, radiating a terrifying, quiet fury. “If you refuse,” she paused, letting the threat hang in the sterile, heavily air-conditioned air like a descending Guillotine, “you are no longer a Harrington. You will have nothing. I will freeze your accounts. I will cancel your tuition. You will not have a home, a car, or a family. You will be dead to us.”
The silence that followed was suffocating, broken only by the frantic beeping of the apnea monitor on Lily’s tiny chest. Chloe looked desperately at Ethan, then back at her mother’s unyielding, marble face. I could see the weight of the entire world bearing down on the frail girl’s shoulders, preparing to crush her.
