“If I’m being totally honest, I was relieved. We were so young, and the thought of a baby was… It was the most overwhelming thing I could imagine at that time. I gave her the money I’d saved from cutting grass the summer before, and I went with her to the clinic. It was horrible and heartbreaking. I thought she was never going to stop crying.”

Erin’s eyes filled with tears. “I’m so sorry you went through such a traumatic thing when you were so young. Your parents really didn’t know?”

He shook his head. “We went to tremendous lengths to make sure no one would ever know. I didn’t want her to be the talk of our school, so I insisted we tell no one. Somehow we managed to get through it without anyone knowing. Afterward, we tried to get back to normal, but our normal had been permanently altered. We broke up a couple of months later, which was a second round of heartbreak.” Even as he stroked her hair, he seemed a million miles away. “I think about the baby and who he or she might’ve been. It’s hard to believe he or she would be twenty-four now, a fully grown adult, maybe a college graduate.”

Hoping to hide her emotional response to his heartfelt words, she closed her eyes and kissed his chest.

“You know what’s funny? When you’re sixteen, you think you’ll grow up and get married and have kids and everything will unfold in a certain expected order. But then life happens and nothing goes as planned, and you wake up at nearly forty and realize you never again came close to being a father.”

“It’s not too late, especially for guys. Look at Tony Randall, who became a dad at seventy something.”

Slim grunted out a laugh. “Yeah, no thanks on that.”

“Still, it could happen.”

Smiling, he let her hair slide through his fingers. “I told you mine,” he said with a teasing glint in his eye that let her know he was okay after sharing his secret pain with her. “Now tell me yours.”

Erin knew she was under no obligation to tell him her deepest secret, but after what he’d told her, she didn’t feel right giving him anything less. “Mine is also something that no one else knows.”

He tilted his head, giving her his undivided attention.

“After Toby died, I… There’s just no way I can adequately describe the despair. And the worst part? We had to share our agony with three thousand other families and an entire nation that was changed forever by what happened that day. But for us, for me, it was so intensely personal.”