Chapter Two – The Weight of Small Town Rebecca once told me that Maplewood was too small for secrets. She was right.
Every street corner had a pair of eyes. Every porch swing had a neighbor with a cup of coffee and a ready tongue. Even the pews in church felt alive, as though they were watching, waiting to whisper about who sat with who, and why.
When I was seventeen, I didn't care. Love was enough—or at least, I thought it was. Rebecca's smile had the power to make the whole world vanish. When she slipped her hand into mine as we walked past the white fences lining Maple Street, I felt untouchable. What could gossip matter when she laughed with me by the lake?
But poverty doesn't care about laughter. Poverty doesn't care about dreams.
My father's farm had been struggling for years. The land was tired, the soil refusing to yield more than enough for our own table. His hands were rough and calloused, his back bent from work that never paid enough. He always said, "A man must provide, Daniel. A man must stand, even if the world falls apart around him."
I wasn't half the man he was.
Rebecca's family wasn't any better off. Her mother worked herself ragged cleaning the homes of Maplewood's wealthier families—the Carpenters, the Wilsons, even the mayor's wife. I can still see the lines on her mother's face, the way she'd rub her knees after long days on her hands and knees, scrubbing floors that would never be hers.
We were two children of broken households, clinging to each other as if our love could somehow rewrite the story.
Until that night.
It was late summer. The air was heavy with humidity, cicadas crying in the trees. Rebecca asked me to meet her by the lake, where we always went when the world pressed too hard. She sat on the old wooden pier, her feet dangling above the rippling water. I knew something was wrong before she even spoke.
Her voice trembled as she said, "Daniel… I'm late."
I froze. "Late?"
She nodded, tears glistening in her eyes. "It's been weeks. I—I think I'm pregnant."
The ground beneath me seemed to vanish. Pregnant. The word hit me like a stone thrown straight into my chest. My mind spun with questions, with fear, with the crushing weight of responsibility I wasn't ready to bear.
I sank to my knees beside her. "Are you sure?"
"I don't know," she whispered, her voice breaking. "But I feel it. I know my body, Daniel. I know."
We sat in silence, the night pressing in around us. I wanted to be strong, to pull her close and promise her that we would be okay. But the truth was a storm inside me. I wasn't ready. Neither of us were.
"What are we going to do?" she finally asked. Her voice was small, fragile.
"I don't know," I admitted. "Rebecca, I don't have money. My father can barely feed us as it is. And your mother—" I stopped, unable to finish.
She turned to me, desperation in her eyes. "We can't let the whole town know. Do you understand what they'll do to me? To us? Pastor Graham preaches forgiveness every Sunday, but you know how they whisper. They'll look at me like I'm ruined."
Her words cut deep. Because she was right. Maplewood was a town of light—but it was also a town of judgment. A girl carrying a child out of wedlock? She'd be branded forever. And me? I'd be the boy who failed her.
I felt fear like I had never known before. Not fear of the child, but of the eyes that would follow us, the whispers that would crush us. Fear of the future we weren't ready to face.
We were standing at the edge of an ocean, and the waves were too big.
Rebecca's hand trembled as she reached for mine. "Daniel, we need to figure something out."
And that's when the thought entered my mind—a thought I should have cast out, a thought that would haunt me for the rest of my life.
There had to be another way..