My parents threw me out at nineteen because I wouldn’t end my pregnancy. Ten years later I drove back with my son and knocked on the same door and I finally told them who his father was.

Leo is not the child of a married man or a man twice my age.

He is my brother’s son.

I was three weeks along when I told them because I knew the exact date of the transfer. It was in a diary.

If I end this, it won’t just be me it happens to.

I meant that there would be nothing of Rhys left at all. I was nineteen and that was the best sentence I could find and it was a terrible one.

He passed that June.

I did not know.

I had changed my number and moved states and my mother had no way of reaching me that she was willing to use.

I found out three weeks afterwards from a cousin who tracked down the girl whose room I was renting.

I missed my own brother’s funeral.

And that is why my parents’ hands were shaking on that porch.