She stared at her wife, the question marks written all over her face. She sipped her tea and closed her eyes. She imagined that she was on a quiet beach, her toes in the sand, and the wind in her hair. She always felt peace on the beach, so often she took her paints and her brushes there, and would paint for hours. But right now, she needed that serenity to guide her to reveal a huge piece of her past to her wife. She opened her eyes seconds later to see her wife staring at her, a soft smile on her lips.

“First off I want to say I am sorry. I’ve hidden something so big from you, something so huge that changed my life and shaped the way I lived my life.”

“It’s ok Bette.”

“No Tina, no talking. I just need you to hear me, listen,” Bette said and Tina pursed her lips together and nodded, “this is hard for me to say and the only person who knows about this is my father and Kit. No one else.”

She sipped her tea again and licked her lips. This was going to be a long, hard night for the both of them and hopefully Tina would understand why it’s taken so long to tell her this. Hopefully she understands the magnitude of the situation and keeps her perfect mind open.

“When I was sixteen I fell in love. He was a twenty-one year old artist I met at a gallery in New York. I was just a mere artist, with no real ambition to become an artist. I drew here and there, I took art in school, but I didn’t want to be an artist. I was dead set on becoming a lawyer, then a Supreme Court Judge. He taught me so much about art. He helped me realize what I really wanted to become. I fell in love with his art at first, then with his passion for art, and then finally I realized, I was in love with him. With each passing day we grew closer, we talked of the day he would take me away and we’d live in Paris, or London and just paint. I was so in love with his dreams for us that I didn’t think about any of the consequences of our actions. I found out I was pregnant shortly after I started my junior year. I was afraid, how could I tell my father what I’d done? But Sebastian…that was his name, Sebastian comforted me and helped me realize what a miracle this was. But after I told my father, he became angry, and took me out of school and sent me to an alternative school until I gave birth. Kit was keeping me in contact with him, as I was not allowed to talk to him ever again. Shortly after I’d arrived at my school, I found out that he had died in a car accident. I was devastated, the only person I’d ever loved died. It was horrible but I remembered that I had our son. But when I gave birth is when it all changed, my son died.”