A Million Nights Without You

The day I took my son to his SAT testing center, I ended up in my ex-boyfriend Lance Stephens's volunteer car.

His hands rested on the steering wheel of a Maybach. He was nothing like the broke kid I'd known.

He didn't recognize me, but his gaze drifted to my son.

“What's wrong with him?”

I smiled bitterly. “He hit his head as a toddler. Cerebral palsy.”

“It doesn't affect his intelligence, though,” I added.

Lance clicked his tongue. “My kid's taking the SATs today too. She was worried some students from low-income families wouldn't have a ride, so she made me come volunteer.”

“Kids are their parents' whole world. I get it.” His face softened with indulgence. “She's the only one I'll ever need in this life.”

I watched his smiling face in the rearview mirror, and something cinched tight behind my ribs. What he didn't know was that Mike was his child too.

……

When we got out, rain had started to fall. I cheered Mike on and watched him push through the downpour toward the testing center. Lance came up behind me.

“So you actually kept that bastard.”

I froze. Then he kept going.

“And he turned out to be a cripple. God really does have a sense of justice.”

Lance lit a cigarette and pointed toward a girl standing tall and straight in the crowd.

“That's my daughter. Adopted, sure, but she's obedient, well-behaved, and perfectly healthy.”

He lowered his voice. “Betraying me back then—do you regret it yet?”

My whole body locked up. Then I saw a woman walk over to his side.

“Honey, I thought you were driving test-takers. Why are you chatting up some other woman?”

Lance exhaled a slow ring of smoke, that same contempt still in his eyes. “Her son has cerebral palsy. Probably can't even take care of himself.”

“Ew.” The woman stepped back. “You need to get that car detailed. How'd you end up picking someone like that? What awful luck.”

I lowered my head so I wouldn't have to see the malice in her eyes.

“Honey, it's raining. Let's get a hotel room and rest for a bit.”

“Sure.” Lance smiled and brushed past me.

That retreating figure had nothing left of the boy he'd once been.

Memories of Lance Stephens crashed into me all at once.

We'd started as seatmates in high school. The day we both got into the same university, I said yes when he confessed.

Three years and four months together, loving each other down to the bone, until I got pregnant with his child in that tiny rented room.

I didn't know what to do.

I thought of my family's clan rules. My father's severe face. My mother's swollen, cried-out eyes.

Fat raindrops hammered my body. I huddled under the eaves like something wrecked.

I prayed to the sky. In the sixteen-odd years since Lance and I split, the only thing keeping me alive had been my son.

If he could just take the SATs and get into college, I'd have no regrets left in this life.

During the half year my father kept me locked in the family chapel, I bit down and never once spoke Lance's name.

My mother screamed herself hoarse. “The clan rules won't allow an abortion. If you don't bring that man back, your life is over.”

All I could think of was the way Lance's eyes curved when he smiled, and the textbooks he'd flipped through so many times the pages were falling apart.

I knew that boy from the mountain village dreamed of staying in the city. I couldn't chain him to a life he never asked for.

So I told my parents, “I drank too much off campus that night. I don't even know whose it is.”

After that, the university expelled me. The day I gave birth, I passed out three times from the pain, my nails digging into my own flesh until they cracked and broke.

My father held the newborn and said, “Get rid of him quietly. You stay home. You're not going anywhere.”

I begged him through tears, but the baby in my arms just grinned up at me, oblivious, with eyes that looked exactly like Lance's.

So I ran. I took my child and I ran, and I raised him one odd job at a time for sixteen years.