Total pages in book: 111
Estimated words: 105846 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 529(@200wpm)___ 423(@250wpm)___ 353(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 105846 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 529(@200wpm)___ 423(@250wpm)___ 353(@300wpm)
I guess what makes this letter so hard is that you were always so kind to me. And what I did to you, whether you knew or not, was terrible.
What I’m about to tell you is going to make you feel awful and betrayed and probably a whole bunch of other emotions that you don’t deserve to feel.
God, Norah, I’m so sorry for what you’re about to read.
About three months into my position as Thomas’s assistant, we started an affair.
And it was a fully involved affair. It lasted for months. We slept together at the office. At your apartment when you were out of town on a girls’ trip. A few times, I even went on his business trips with him for the sole intention of continuing our affair.
He told me he loved me. He told me he wanted to marry me. He told me he was going to call things off with you soon. He told me a lot of things, but the day I found out I was pregnant with his child, everything changed.
When I told him about the baby, he became a different man. At one point, when I mentioned the possibility of telling you about the pregnancy, he got violent.
I look back on things now and realize how wrong I was about him. How wrong I was about myself. How wrong I was in what I did to you.
The day after I told Thomas I was pregnant, people showed up at my front door to talk to me. It was Thomas’s lawyer, your mother, and her lawyer. They were pretending to be nice but kept referring to the baby as “the situation that we need to deal with.”
This living, growing child inside my body was a situation to them. Not a human. Not a baby. But a problem they needed to fix.
In the moment, I didn’t fully comprehend that. I was mostly just in shock, and their manipulative words were clever in their delivery. They made me feel bad about myself. They made me feel like I was the one who created “this problem.” They even went as far as to tell me that the pregnancy would ruin my life. That I had so much potential, and if I stopped my life and career to raise a child, all of that potential would be lost.
My life would be lost.
They verbalized all the insecurities I was already having about being pregnant. It goes without saying that an eighteen-year-old girl who spent most of her life in and out of foster care is already thinking about those kinds of things. And it didn’t help that I trusted your mother so much. I mean, she had helped me with so many things. Helped me in ways that no one in my life had ever done before.
I was scared. And worried. And I didn’t know if I could even handle raising a baby on my own.
I was barely making rent as it was on the small internship wage I was getting from King Financial, and I wanted to keep going to college.
The next parts of this story are painful. Painful for a lot of reasons, but mostly, because I let them talk me into something I should’ve never considered.
They told me an abortion was the best way to handle “the situation.” Your mother ensured they would make sure all my medical bills were handled, and that only the best doctor in the city would do the procedure, one she knew well personally. She said she’d make sure I’d be in the best hands and that I was doing the right thing for my future.
The two lawyers insisted I sign an NDA. They told me if I signed it, I would receive financial compensation that would give me a generous start in life.
They dangled the golden ticket in front of my face, but there was only one stipulation—I had to have an abortion and sign an NDA that prevented me from ever talking about Thomas King or “the situation” again.
I don’t know why I did it, but I signed the NDA. I agreed to abort the child inside me. I guess, in that moment, I did it because what they were saying felt like it made sense.
Once I signed the NDA, your mother scheduled my appointment. She even made sure that a fancy black town car with tinted windows and a driver came to pick me up that day. The driver was going to take me to the clinic and take me home after. It was the full five-star treatment…for an abortion.
I got in the car. And I let him drive me all the way to the private clinic your mother had chosen and said was the best in the city.
I got out of the car, and I went inside. I let the nurses prep me for my procedure.