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Lenora couldn’t bring herself to look at me as she stood and carried my son out of the room, even as I begged her to stay.
“No, Lenora! Please, please don’t go! Please give him to me!”
I wanted to chase after her, but I couldn’t. My body was tooweak. The effort of bringing a new life into the world had sapped all life from me. Still, I tried, continuing to scream.
“Please, Lenora! Let me have my baby!”
But she was already gone, shutting the door between the rooms and blocking out the sound of my child’s cries. Miss Baker grabbed my father by the shoulders and shook him.
“Winston, you can’t do this,” she hissed. “It’s barbaric.”
“It’s for the best,” my father said. “This family can’t afford another scandal.”
“But Virginia is your daughter. Your only legitimate daughter. And if you take that child away from her, you’ll lose her forever.”
“I refuse to have another bastard in this family,” my father said.
“Says a man who’s likely fathered several,” Miss Baker shot back.
Ignoring the remark, my father knelt before me, untouched by my despair. Even as I wept, he said, “I’m sorry, my darling. You brought this on yourself.”
“Please,” I said, my voice weakening as quickly as my body. “Please let me keep him. I’ll be a good girl if you do. I’ll never do anything wrong again.”
My father chucked my chin. “My darling, you’ve done enough wrong to last a lifetime.”
Exhaustion lapped over me in waves so strong I suspected I was dying of heartbreak. I hoped so. Death seemed a better option than this unfathomable grief. Yet I remained alive as Miss Baker dressed me in a fresh nightgown and put me to bed. As she mopped up the mess I’d made on the floor, I listened for the sound of my son in the other room.
All was quiet.
The only one still crying was me.
Miss Baker, done with cleaning, clasped my hand. “Don’t worry, Virginia. I’ll think of something to make him change his mind.”
I was too tired--and too utterly despondent--to reply. Grief and exhaustion had me in their grip, and I felt like I was being pulled into a dark pit from which I’d never emerge. The last thing I heard was Miss Baker saying, “I swear to you, he won’t take that child from you forever.”
She was lying.
I never saw her--or my child--again.
THIRTY-NINE
I didn’t think it could get any worse. That Virginia had endured enough.
I was wrong.
Because Lenora keeps talking, revealing all the ways in which her sister had suffered. Forced to give birth on the floor. The baby taken from her before she could even hold him. Her father’s casual disdain in the face of her heartbreak. It’s all so tragic it takes my breath away.
“You should have stopped him,” I say, speaking despite the sudden tightness in my chest. “You should have defied his orders.”
“I wanted to,” Lenora says, her voice cracking. “Truly, I did. But you didn’t know my father. He was capable of great cruelty. I worried he really would murder that child if given the chance. And I was certain he’d go through with his threat to disown me. I wasn’t his daughter. Not really.”
“But shewasyour sister!”
“In name only. We were never close. Virginia and I were as opposite as summer and winter.”
The comparison is apt. Looking at Lenora Hope, all I see is frigid coldness. Upstairs lies Virginia, as warm and restless as a July afternoon. Two sisters who, like the seasons they represent, never connected. Something always stood between them.
So Lenora took the baby into what was Miss Baker’s room but isnow mine. She cradled him and shushed his cries by letting him suckle her pinkie finger. She waited for her father to return and tell her what to do.