There weren’t any buds on the bush yet. But that was just as well. We had walked all the way over to ensure that this particular bush never, ever bloomed again.

This was the bush that Trey’s mother had planted upon learning that her lover’s wife was expecting a baby. As Trey stared at it, he told me what his mother had shared with him in the days that had passed since the dramatic events on Monday at Violet’s house. “My mom told me that when I was about four months old, she decided to drive down to Chicago to confront him.” He couldn’t bring himself to even say Mr. Simmons’s name, and I didn’t blame him. “Kind of shady. She was already married to Walter at that point, which makes me think I haven’t really appreciated how much he must have cared about her, you know? To marry her when she was six months pregnant with some other guy’s kid? And she was still head over heels for Violet’s dad, really hoping he’d take her back. I guess she got it into her head that if she just showed him his son, he’d change his mind. She thought he’d at least want to be involved in my life.”

I tried to imagine Trey’s mom when she wasn’t much older than we were, making the long drive down to Chicago alone with an infant buckled into a car seat. Desperate. Scared. Probably feeling a little like all of us had been since October.

Trey continued, “She’s embarrassed about the whole thing now, obviously. She said she was young and hopelessly in love, and she didn’t understand then that people from families like his don’t just marry young, uneducated girls from families like hers.”

I couldn’t help but feel sympathetic toward Trey’s mom.

“When she confronted him on campus, he was furious. She’d accepted a ton of money when she’d agreed to terminate the pregnancy, and the moment he saw me he started threatening her with legal action. He told her that his wife was expecting a baby, and that she was stupid to think he’d leave the woman he loved after the fertility troubles they’d been experiencing to instead run off with some hick from his hometown.”

“What did your mom do with the money?” I dared to ask. When I’d pinched a letter from Mr. Simmons’s attorneys out of the Emorys’ mailbox over the holidays and read it, it had said that Mr. Simmons was attempting to collect almost two million dollars from Trey’s mom.

“Turns it out wasn’t that much,” Trey admitted. “It was like a hundred and seventy-five thousand dollars. And to my mom, back then? That seemed like a fortune. It was enough to buy the house on Martha Road with cash. The two million dollars they were trying to squeeze out of her was based on some kind of penalty for violating the contract and an insane interest rate that they’d applied. But they only started really pushing her for that money last fall, when Simmons and his family moved back to Willow.”