My name is Anne Mercer. Everyone calls me Annie.

My story began thirty-one years before that hospital room, in my parents’ kitchen on Linden Street, on a Thursday night in October.

I was eighteen. A senior in high school.

And I was pregnant.

I’d known for three weeks. I’d taken four tests in the bathroom at the gas station on Route 30, because I was too scared to take one at home. All four were positive. I’d thrown up in that gas station bathroom, then sat on the floor and cried until the attendant knocked on the door to ask if I was okay.

I waited three weeks to tell my parents because I knew what would happen.

My father, Harold Mercer, was a deacon at First Methodist and the manager of the hardware store on Main Street. He was a large, quiet man who ironed his own shirts and went to bed at nine-thirty every night. He didn’t yell often. He didn’t need to. When he went quiet, the whole house went quiet with him.

My mother, Lorraine, did what my father wanted. She always had. She was small and nervous and kept the house so clean you could eat off the kitchen floor. She sang hymns while she ironed. She never once, in eighteen years, argued with him in front of me.

I told them on a Thursday because Thursday was meatloaf night, and my father was always in a good mood on meatloaf night.

I waited until dinner was over. My mother was standing at the sink drying a casserole dish with a yellow dish towel. My father was sitting at the head of the table with his reading glasses on, doing the crossword in the evening paper.

“Mom,” I said. “Dad. I need to tell you something.”

My mother turned around with the dish towel in her hands.

My father looked up over his glasses.

“I’m pregnant,” I said.

My mother dropped the dish towel.

It fell on the clean kitchen floor in a little yellow heap. She didn’t pick it up.

My father put down his pen. He took off his reading glasses very slowly and folded them and set them on the table next to the newspaper.

Then he pushed his chair back. It scraped across the linoleum. It was the loudest sound I’d ever heard in that kitchen.

“Who’s responsible?” he said.

“I’m not telling you,” I said.

I’d never defied him that openly. Not once in my whole life. I’d never even said no to second helpings.

My father stared at me across the kitchen table.

“Anne,” he said quietly. “Who is the father?”

“I’m not telling you, Dad.”

“I’ll find out.”

“Then you’ll have to find out without me.”

He stood up. My father is six foot three. When he stood up all the way, the top of his head almost touched the light fixture over the table.

“I am going to find out who did this to you,” he said. “And I am going to go to his house. And I am going to have a conversation with him and his parents. Do you understand me?”

“That’s exactly why I’m not telling you,” I said.