When Stephanie Maypeace’s father dies after a long illness, leaving her the house in San Francisco, she knows that it’s time to go back home. There, she hopes to begin the quiet, ordinary life that she has always longed for – no doors slammed behind her parents’ arguments, no footsteps entering or leaving the house late at night.
Enter Rob, her sister’s old boyfriend. Steph is drawn to him, even though he treats her more like a kid sister than like a girl he’s interested in. When he finally asks her out to dinner she’s thrilled, but the evening ends in disaster.
Maybe she shouldn’t have invited him in after he kissed her goodnight on the front porch. Maybe she should have stopped him when her shirt came off. She definitely should have said no when they ended up naked on the floor together. She can’t call it rape – after all, she never told him to stop. She might even have been able to forgive the violation of her body, if he hadn’t said her sister’s name instead of hers.
Steph knows an abortion would be the easy answer, the choice that would allow her to erase his intrusion into her body the way she’s erased his number from her phone. What she doesn’t know is whether she has the courage to keep this child she never wanted and the strength to love it because of – not in spite of – the way it was conceived.
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