She laughs. A little surprisedhathat she immediately swallows, but it’s very pretty.
I grin at her. “How many other plants have I put in peril by putting them in front of the wrong window?”
She bites her lower lip.
“You can tell me the truth.” I mean it on every level. But we’ll start with plants. “Half of them?”
“The ferns can stay here,” she says diplomatically. “They’re doing well.”
I accept my fate. “I’ll move the rest, then.”
“They’ll be happier with morning sun.”
“Aren’t we all?”
She tips her face up to look at me, surprise lifting her eyebrows. “I think so, yes.”
Up close like this, she looks less like a glossy city girl than I first thought. Those rose gold sunglasses were doing a lot to imprint that impression, I guess.
Tonight, she looks painfully young.
Too young to be a single mother, although obviously not.
I take a deep breath. “You know, Luna was only sixteen when she had Ridge. If you?—”
Her brow lifts even more.
I stop talking.
She has a car, albeit a few years out of date in registration, according to Cash. So that means she’s not a teenager anymore, although she might have been when she had Bellamy.
I push off the window frame and push both hands into my pockets. “We don’t judge anyone here. For choices or circumstance. You’re still pretty young. You have the rest of your life ahead of you, and it can be whatever you want it to be. Whatever made you feel like greenhouses used tobe the stuff of nightmares…it won't follow you here.”
She holds my gaze for a long stretch. I don’t look away. I let her search my eyes, my face, my spirit for whatever she needs to see.
And that patience is rewarded when she finally nods. “I had Bellamy when I was eighteen. Got pregnant in high school. Barely made it to graduation before my parents kicked me out. I went to a pregnancy resource centre, thinking I might get an abortion, and it wasn’t that easy. They were affiliated with a church or something, and they kept pressuring me to consider other options.”
Fury rises in my chest, fast and vicious.
“Places like that should be illegal, misrepresenting themselves,” I grind out.
Her eyes spark with surprise, and she nods. “Yes,” she says softly. “They should be. I didn’t know then. And…I don’t regret keeping Bellamy, but I do…”
She closes her eyes, pain twisting her expression into something so fragile I want to pull her into my arms.
“I regret what happened next,” she whispers.
It feels so wrong to be clenching my fists in my pockets when I could use my hands for something better, like holding her shaking shoulders or wiping those unshed tears off her cheeks the second they fall.
But she takes a deep breath and a slow blink, and then those tears disappear and her shoulders square up. Her wet, spiky eyelashes are the only remaining evidence that she had a moment where she almost lost it there.
“Any time you want to talk about it,” I offer. “I’m a decent listener.”
“Hate talking about it, actually,” she replies.
“Fair enough. Listen, you’re…what, twenty-one?”
“Twenty-two last month,” she says softly.
