I picked him over my own kid. I know how that sounds. I knew it then too, somewhere, and I went and did it anyway.

I’m going to put the whole thing down here because I haven’t said it out loud to a single living soul.

Last Thursday I found something behind a dresser in my house. I’ll get to it. I need to tell it in order or I’ll lose my nerve.

It was just me and Lauren for a long time. Her dad took off when she was two, and I worked nights cleaning offices and some weekends at a diner off Route 9. She was an easy little girl, honestly. She’d wait up for me with the TV on low and fall asleep on the couch with her shoes still on. I’d carry her to bed. That’s the part I keep coming back to. How light she was. How much she trusted me to come home.

Then I met Dale. He was steady, had a job at the parts warehouse, paid for dinner, made me laugh after years of nobody making me laugh. When Lauren was about 13 he started staying over, and by the time she was 14 he’d more or less moved in. I thought I’d finally caught a break. I’ll be honest with you, I was tired of being the only grown-up in the house.

Lauren didn’t take to him. I figured that was normal. What teenager wants a new man around. But one night she stood in the kitchen doorway and said something I shoved straight out of my head. “I don’t like how he looks at me.” That was it. Plain as that. And you know what I said? I told her she was being dramatic. I actually said the word dramatic to my own daughter.

I told her to be grateful somebody was around to help. Lord forgive me.

After that she started locking her bedroom door every single night. Nine o’clock, on the dot. Click. I’d be standing at the sink and I’d hear it through the wall. Click. Every night. And not once, not one single time, did I walk down that hall and ask her why a 14-year-old felt like she needed to bolt herself in. I told myself she was just being moody. The truth is it was easier not to ask. If I asked, I might have to hear the answer.

Dale had his own version of her and I ate it right up. He’d say she was disrespectful. He’d say she gave him dirty looks, that she slammed doors, that she was trying to come between us. And I agreed with him. Every time. It was easier to agree. You see what kind of woman I was. When my girl and my man told me two different things, I sided with the man who’d been in my life two years over the child I carried.