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When Rose finally got up the nerve to tell her mother about her pregnancy, it was January of her senior year, and she was a little more than three months pregnant. To add insult to injury, her mother didn’t speak to her for an entire day, a day that felt cursed and frigid with snow. And then, her mother came into her bedroom, closed the door behind her, and said, “Here’s what we’re going to do. We’re going to talk to the Legacy Club. We’re going to make sure this goes away.”

Bruised from her mother’s silence, Rose didn’t know what to say. Frightened and alienated, she listened to her mother, wanting to fall into her mother’s wisdom, since it was the only wisdom she had access to. Her mother said, “You’re too young to have a baby. You have your whole life ahead of you. You don’t know what you want to make of it yet. You don’t want to ruin your life, nor anyone else’s.”

Rose told her mother that the baby wasn’t Rhett’s, but she wasn’t sure if her mother believed her.

But the truth came out the following week in the living room of Eleanor Pike’s place, when Rose told the Legacy Club, “The baby’s Nathaniel Hawkins’s. His family can’t know. Nobody can.”

At this, her mother gasped. She sat next to Rose, pale-faced and ashamed.

Eleanor Pike and her cronies continued to look unbothered and stoic. Rose wished they’d say something. It didn’t matter to her what they said. She wanted them to offer their condolences, call her a bad person, or suggest she deserved to be ridiculed in public. But the silence was deafening.

“I don’t want my name all over the tabloids,” Rose finally whispered, her eyes on the floor.

Then Eleanor Pike told her, “We’ll make this go away.”

Rose and her mother believed her. Because there was nothing else to say, Rose and her mother put on their coats and left Eleanor Pike’s place, walking the glum and frozen sidewalks all the way home. Back there, Rose’s brother was having a pizza party for the other members of the basketball team, and Rose ran up to her bedroom and hid for the rest of the night. She couldn’t believe this was her life.

Her mother decided to homeschool Rose for the rest of senior year. One day later that January, without warning her friends or telling any of her teachers, Rose went to school for the last time. Heavy with nostalgia and a growing womb, Rose walked the hallways, her books pressed against her chest. She took a math test, sensing all along that she would probably get a good grade. It was a good grade that wouldn’t ultimately matter. She cried in the bathroom. There was a little drama that day when her best friend accused Rose of being “sort of out of it,” then broke down into tears because her boyfriend was ignoring her. Rose held her at the cafeteria table, watching as snow fluttered outside. It looked like feathers. She felt older than she ever had.

That afternoon, Rose returned home, put on her pajamas, and crawled into bed. She didn’t get out for dinner, breakfast the following morning, or dinner the following night. She knew her mother had already made the call to pull her out of school, but she was too exhausted, emotionally and physically, to consider it.

Later that week, her best friend called, demanding answers. But Rose told her mother, and then her brother, and then her father that she couldn’t talk. Her brother was confused about why she’d dropped out of school, but when their mother explained what had happened and what needed to be kept a secret, he promised he wouldn’t spread the news around. Rose decided he didn’t want to be known as the brother of the girl who’d gotten pregnant.

Suddenly and dramatically, after a lifetime as one of the most social people on the island, Rose Calder became a recluse. She left her house only for doctor appointments. For hours every day, she watched bad television and watched her stomach grow. Sometimes, she did homework for the vague “homeschool work” her mother had gotten her from the library. But she missed the normalcy of her high school schedule. She missed having teachers who demanded she care.

She could feel her brain rotting in her head.

Three weeks after Rose was supposed to graduate from high school, she went into labor. Sitting on her childhood bed, listening to the television downstairs, to her mother making dinner, her father complaining about something, and her brother talking on the phone, Rose closed her eyes and told herself that this would be over soon.

But as the pain rolled through her, it felt increasingly hard to believe. Ever since Thanksgiving, when she'd realized she was pregnant with Nathaniel Hawkins’s baby, and ever since Christmas, when she'd realized that Nathaniel Hawkins would most certainly not be involved in her life or the baby’s, she’d been living in the dullest of all nightmares. Would she ever be normal again?

Rose practiced deep breathing, willing herself to stay in her room a little longer, until her mother finished dinner and her brother went out for the night. She didn’t want to ruin anyone’s evening with her labor. She wanted everything to be normal.

When at last she told her mother it was time, her mother called Eleanor Pike. Rose felt panicked.

“Aren’t we going to the hospital?”

Her mother shook her head. “We want to keep this a secret, don’t we?”

Rose was speechless. But she realized that everything had been pre-arranged. If she really wanted to get back to her normal life, if she really wanted to leave the island one day and have a career and make something of herself, she needed to go along with what her mother and the Legacy Club told her to do.

Alone in her room, her heart fluttering, Rose listened as her mother suggested to her brother and father that they get a hotel room for the night. Although Rose was relieved they weren't in the house, she felt ashamed. She could hear her brother zipping up his suitcase and grumbling to himself in his room. She wondered how much her pregnancy had affected him over the past few months. She wondered if he’d felt angry about having to lie for her.

Not long after her father and brother left, a woman Rose had never seen before came to the house. She carried with her medical equipment and spoke in a stern voice, telling Rose what to do and how to breathe and how to position her body. Rose hadn’t known that she’d be giving birth in her childhood bedroom. She protested, but her mother gave her a look that meant, "Don’t argue." Let’s get this over with.

Labor took a little more than eight hours. Rose was delirious for much of it, so much so that her brain was already forgetting it by the time the baby arrived.

When Rose’s baby began to cry, she gazed down at the far end of the bed and saw her: a little red creature, arms and legs waving wildly. Rose’s heart exploded. This was her baby. This was the baby she’d spent nine months growing. This was the baby who’d kicked her continually during the nights. This was the reason she’d had to drop out of school and hide herself away. Oh, but she was so perfect, so small, so darling! Even her cries were cute.

But already, the woman who’d helped her deliver was leaving the room with her baby.

“Come back,” Rose croaked. “Please!”

But the woman turned back at her and said, “It’s easier this way.”

Immediately, Rose let out a single sob, then forced herself to quiet down. Her mother brought washcloths and changes of clothing and helped Rose clean herself up. Throughout, Rose and her mother couldn’t look one another in the eye.

“I want to meet her, Mom,” Rose said, referring to the baby. “I want to hold her.”