“You should be proud. You did what was best, didn’t you?”

Molly is twenty when her mother says this. They are sitting opposite each other on Molly’s lunch break, and her mother’s smile is sincere, her makeup impeccable, and her black hair waves gently in the breeze.

Molly, sitting there in her work clothes, buttoned and prim, wants to desperately reach over and rake her nails over her mother’s pale, pointed features. It’s her son’s birthday, his fourth in fact, and as hard as she has tried to suppress things, she’s found in the incoming days that she can’t.

She can’t ignore the bag that she keeps beneath her bed, the one that had been meant for the hospital but had never been used. The clothes inside of it, the blankets, even the ones she had used for the birth and had washed over and over and over again, the peter rabbit that still was tucked into the corner….

She thinks of it as she looks at her mother’s smile and says, “What, exactly do you mean?”

Her mother waves her hand carelessly around them, the glass building and the white balcony and the expensive food. “Do you really think that you could have accomplished any of this if you would have been a mother at that age, Margaret?” Fuck, she hates that; her mother only uses her full, real name when she wants to make a point. She stiffens on automatic, fingers clenching around her cup. “You would have ended up in a minimum wage job, struggling everyday to make ends meet. Or worse, you could have had another child. You would have wasted away. What you’ve accomplished now? It wouldn’t have been anything but a dream.”

Molly deserves an Academy Award for keeping her face straight and her thoughts to herself when she nods. The amount of venom and anger pooling in the pit of her stomach, roaring in her ears almost puts that to an end. She finishes her meal, and goes home, and she doesn’t do anything else that day except clutch the rabbit tightly in her hand.

It takes years for her to roll over her mother’s words over and over again. On the way she’d said it, the casual way it had wrapped on her tongue. You did what was best.

And Molly knows, feels different. She hasn’t forgotten her insistence that she could have kept him, she hasn’t forgotten the desperate confusion when she’d tried to clutch for Teddy only to find him gone or the haze of disorientation in the weeks, months, years after.

Something about the way her mother spoke didn’t sit right, didn’t align with everything Molly remembered in the months before his birth and the immediate after.

It doesn’t take until 2016 until she finally decides to ask her, on one of the dwindling calls. She’s not sure what possesses her to think of Teddy, trying to meander through the pleasantries of her mother’s calls, navigating her doldrum life. Only that she’d suffered through forty five minutes of her mother’s annoyances before she blurted out, “Do you remember what I was hospitalized for? After I had him?” She’s a coward, not able to say my son around her mother.

There’s a long silence, the longest she’s ever sustained on their calls that wasn’t out of boredom or Molly forgetting to take her phone off of mute. “What brought this up?” Her mother’s voice is cool, distant on the line. Molly can hear her rustling papers, a sure sign that her mother didn’t care for the subject at hand. How many times had she made that gesture about something Molly cared about, only to fold her hands neatly in her lap as her brothers talked their baseball scores? “That was a really chaotic time, dear. We were concerned you weren’t going to make it.”

And not him? Molly’s mouth had thinned, then. He was sick, too, worse off than her. One of the few things she recalled was how blue he seemed in comparison to her. “I was just wondering. I can’t remember much about it--”

“You were drugged up to your ears, yes,” her mother interjects, “You had an infection of some kind, as far as I remember. I talked to the doctors at the time and they were more concerned with shooing me away than helping.”

Molly’s hands clench up, fingernails digging into her palms. That doesn’t satisfy her then, and it doesn’t satisfy her years later, the more she turns it over, the more she wonders what, exactly, went on. No matter rationalization she comes up with, no matter how many time she tosses and turns, nothing makes sense.

Nothing except the consideration that her mother had a plan in place months before. And her mother could be called many things. Molly just hoped that the thought in the back of her head was wrong.