Page 155 of The Professor's Wife

“Were you?”

“Sometimes.”

He waited.

“Sometimes I was,” I repeated. “I could be awful. I would lose my temper and say things. I’d regret them afterward, but by then I’d already done the damage.”

“You were a kid.”

“I wasn’t always a kid.”

“No. But it sounds like it started when you were.”

I looked out the window again.

“I had Rowe when I was sixteen.”

Tristan’s expression changed.

“Sixteen?”

“Yeah. I didn’t know what I was doing. I didn’t even know how to look after myself, and suddenly everyone expected me to know how to raise a baby.”

“But you did raise him.”

“Badly, sometimes.”

“Every parent probably thinks that.”

“You don’t know.”

“No,” he agreed. “I don’t.”

The honesty hurt, but at least he didn’t argue with memories he had never lived through.

“People looked at me everywhere I went. At school. At the shops. On the bus. They looked at my stomach and then at my face like they were trying to work out how stupid I had to be.”

“You weren’t stupid.”

“I was sixteen and pregnant.”

“That doesn’t mean—”

“Don’t turn it into something pretty, Tristan. It wasn’t.”

He stopped speaking.

“I love Rowe. More than anything. But I was scared all the time. I had no money. No plan. I kept waiting to feel like an adult, and it never happened.”

Tristan turned onto a narrow road lined with spruce trees.

I looked at him.

“Where are you taking me?”

“I’m pulling over.”

“Why?”