Chapter 4 - The Escape to the Shadows
My father fell out of his seat, dropping to his knees on the carpet in front of me. Tears streamed freely down his lined cheeks, soaking his collar.
"Emma..." he sobbed, reaching out trembling hands toward me, but stopping short, afraid to touch me. "I didn't know... I thought... I thought you were just being reckless... I thought you were throwing your life away for some meaningless fling..."
"You didn't ask, Dad," I said, looking down at him. "You let your pride and your fear of town gossip govern your heart. You were so concerned with what the neighbors would think about an unmarried nineteen-year-old daughter that you threw me out into the snow with less than fifty dollars in my bank account."
Leo reached over and placed his small hand on my arm. "It's okay, Mom. I'm here."
I smiled at my son, running my fingers through his dark hair. "I know, sweetie."
"How did you survive?" my mother asked, her voice raspy from weeping. She leaned across the small table, her hands reaching for mine. "Emma, you were nineteen. You had no money, no place to live, no car..."
"The night you threw me out, I walked three miles to the interstate bus station," I said. "I bought a one-way ticket to Columbus. I slept on a bench at the terminal for two nights until a local women's shelter took me in. The staff there saved my life. They got me prenatal care under an assumed administrative code so Arthur Sterling’s investigators couldn't track my medical records."
"And Arthur?" my father asked, his voice trembling with a mixture of shame and sudden, violent rage. "Did he come looking for you?"
"Yes," I said. "Two months after I left, a private investigator came to the shelter asking questions about a young woman matching my description. But the shelter director was a former legal aid attorney. She recognized the investigator's agency as a high-priced corporate firm from Cleveland. She hid me in a secondary transitional home in Cincinnati before they could verify my identity."
"I took a job washing dishes at a twenty-four-hour diner," I continued, outlining the relentless decade of struggle. "I worked twelve-hour shifts on my feet until the day before Leo was born. When he arrived, I held him in my arms in a county hospital room, completely alone, without a single member of my family present."
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My mother covered her mouth, letting out a heart-wrenching wail.
"I named him Leo," I said, "because he was brave from the moment he took his first breath. He didn't cry when he was born. He just looked at me with those big, bright eyes, as if he knew we had a mountain to climb together."
