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“Never tell your mother,” Humbolt had warned. At first, she’d been too upset to even think of doing so. Later, she’d been under a legal obligation to bite her tongue, but her mother had suspected the affair. That’s why she had begun suggesting Sasha go back to school early.
By the time Sasha was sitting in a teen clinic in a rural part of New Jersey, having come as far away from Manhattan as she could get in hopes she wouldn’t be recognized, she had known she was very much on her own.
Patricia Brooks, a midwife and reproductive counselor, had become her angel. She was the first person in Sasha’s life to treat her as a person. Not an heiress who deserved a deferential attitude. Not a daughter, or stepdaughter, to be criticized and controlled. Not a sexualized body to be objectified, but a human being who could make decisions for herself.
Patty had laid out all of Sasha’s choices, none of them without drawbacks.
“I have a duty to report if there’s abuse,” Patty had also said. “If the father is that much older than you...”
“If you tell anyone, I’ll run away. I swear I will. My parents can’t know I’m pregnant.”
If she’d been an adult and having a baby, Sasha could have used the circumstance to take control of her trust, but having the baby while she was still a minor only created two people Humbolt would use for his own ends. Her baby would become another point of leverage Humbolt could use against her.
Termination was still on the table, barely, but Sasha had wanted to have the baby. In some ways, it had been the ultimate act of autonomy, exercising that monumental decision all by herself, but it was also love—not that she fully understood that emotion. Given her upbringing, it had been more of an attachment to the idea of love, but she’d felt something toward the baby that was bigger than anything she’d ever felt before.
On her third visit with Patty, when she told her that she wanted to have the baby, but couldn’t raise it and didn’t have anywhere to stay while she waited out her pregnancy, Patty invited her to live with her. She had a daughter at home of a similar age. She couldn’t imagine Molly being in dire straits like this without anyone trustworthy to turn to.
Patty was risking her midwife practice by sheltering Sasha, but she was the calm, sensible counsel Sasha needed at the time. She helped her find a lawyer who handled asking the father to relinquish paternity. That was necessary for adoption, but Sasha refused to let him off without consequences of his own. She demanded an enormous trust be set up for her baby and didn’t give a damn how he explained it to his wife.
He had gone along with it to “make the problem go away.” His only stipulation was that Sasha couldn’t tell anyone that he was the father, not even their child. Sasha was fine with that. She didn’t need him. She had Patty.
And Molly.
At first, Patty’s teenage daughter had been a bit of a pill, not sure what to think of this pregnant stranger who had moved into their spare bedroom, but over the ensuing months, they became as close as sisters. Or at least, the kind of sister Sasha had always wished she’d had.
In those days of homeschooling online and learning to cook and never caring about makeup or hair color or what she was wearing, Alexandra became herself. Sasha. She laughed at silly things and took nature walks like a country bumpkin and she grew a baby she loved in the way Patty loved Molly. In the way the two of them loved her.
Sasha could genuinely say it was the happiest time of her life—until she went into labor. That had been horrible, but thankfully quick and uncomplicated.
Then she was holding a tiny girl who looked too small for a long name like Elizabeth, which was the name she’d chosen.
Molly said, “You could call her Libby,” and that’s who she became.
If she could, Sasha would have lived with them forever and raised her daughter there, but her mother was finally suspecting she wasn’t in Ibiza. Staying here would risk all the careful precautions she’d taken to hide that she’d had a baby at all.
“I have to leave, but I can’t bring her with me,” she told Patty when her daughter was a week old. “I can’t.”
“But—” Molly protested.
They were close enough by then that Sasha knew what was bothering her friend. Molly had said it once before.
“How will you leave your baby with strangers?”
“If you’re absolutely certain this is what you want,” Patty said carefully, “then I wonder if you’ll consider letting me adopt her? It could be an open adoption,” Patty rushed on. “That way you could check up on her and see her anytime.”
Such profound relief washed through her, Sasha barely heard Molly say a quietly ecstatic, “Really, Mom?”
“You can never tell anyone, Moll,” Sasha warned her. “Ever. I mean that.”
“I know,” Molly said solemnly. “I swear I never will.”
Three days later, Sasha signed the papers and walked away from her baby, confident she was leaving Libby with people who would give her a far better life and infinitely more love than she could.
It broke her heart. It left her numb for a year or more, uncaring that Humbolt had her assessed by a counselor who diagnosed her as having used toxic drugs. She’d gone to rehab meetings for months, never telling the counselor the real reason she was disassociated and depressed.
Eventually, she rallied enough to go back to school. She returned to ski holidays and attending film premiers and, pretty soon, she had almost convinced herself that it had simply been a very weird dream. It hadn’t really happened.
It had, though. She was already a mother.
