A Woman Like That
Twenty-three. He was sixteen. She knew what that made her, and she answered his letters anyway. Nineteen years on, Kate Gibbons was still paying — in unpaid bills, in a back that wouldn't straighten, in a son raised on the gentlest version of a lie. She told herself she had been a good mother. She told herself the lie was a kindness. She almost made it true. Then her son asked for his birth certificate, and Kate Gibbons went looking for the one man she had spent nineteen years not looking for.
