“That’s just it,” Haley says. “These types of places are meant to be anonymous. You don’t give your name. They don’t record the calls. And they get thousands of calls every month, so to ask a volunteer to remember one specific call is impossible.”

“What are you saying?” I ask. Although I know. I obviously know.

“Hunter.” Haley scoots forward. His face is a mask of seriousness. “You’re running out of chances to be honest with us. But I’m here giving you an opportunity to come clean. So, tell me. Was Chloe pregnant? Were you the father? Is that why you fought at the dance? And did that put so much pressure on you that you felt you had to do something about it?”

Forty-Three

It’s like a dream where I want to scream but can’t.

There’s a big clock with a white face and black numbers above the stove, something Mom picked out a year before she died. It ticks and ticks while all of us sit there saying nothing. Words finally come. “Chloe wouldn’t keep that from me. We didn’t keep things like that from each other.”

The words sound juvenile. Like something spoken by a fool.

Clearly Chloe was keeping things from me. She never mentioned her fears about being pregnant. About the condom breaking. She never told me what was bothering her in the weeks leading up to the dance.

She’d kept me in the dark about a lot.

Haley’s face remains blank, even as a muscle twitches in his jaw. “So you’re telling me, Hunter, that you don’t know anything about this?”

My head shakes. Mind blown.

“Can I ask a question?” Dad says.

Haley ignores him, so Dad just goes on. “Hunter, I can remember when I was young, before Mom and I got married, and I was always worried about getting one of my girlfriends pregnant.”

I sit as still as a statue. Dad has never spoken so casually about sex, never implied he had a sex life before Mom. My first instinct is to say, Please, don’t go there, but Dad is talking to me like I’m an adult. We’ve crossed some invisible barrier, and it’s good.

“What I mean is sometimes I talked about it with my partners,” he says. “And, sometimes, we’d talk about what would happen if she became pregnant. What I’m asking is if you and Chloe ever had that kind of talk?”

It fits Dad that he wouldn’t jump into sex without examining every possible consequence beforehand. He’s not the most impulsive guy in the world.