The Only Truth (Gilmore Girls)

Hard Times

Rory carefully placed her sleepy daughter down in her cot and turned on the musical mobile hanging above. As the soothing lullaby music played and Lily's eyelids became heavier and heavier Rory sat by the side of the cot and intently studied the little girl that had changed her life so much.

Seeing Logan today had been a complete bolt out of the blue. Over recent months she'd taken a leaf out of her mom's book and become quite the expert at compartmentalizing. For a while, Logan had been all she had thought about but she had managed to push him far away into the back of her mind. That was until today. It hadn't always been easy to do, especially as time went on and Lily grew bigger, she seemed to look more and more like her father every day and so Rory faced a constant reminder of the love that she had lost.

Rory had made peace with her decision not to tell Logan about Lily. Most days she felt pretty okay about it as deep down she believed she had done what she was best for them. However, there were still the occasional day when she wondered if she should let him know about Lily, so that one day when her daughter asked about her father and wanted to meet him, it wasn't going to come as a terrible shock.

As she watched her daughter sleeping, Rory thought back to when she had first discovered she was pregnant. It had taken her a while but eventually, she had come to accept that the situation was what it was. Even though the act of becoming pregnant may have been unconscious, the choice to go through with her pregnancy and face parenthood alone, wasn't. Her family and friends had all presumed that the father was Logan but Rory refused to enter into the conversation and on occasion had even led them to believe that someone else had fathered her child, such was her need for him not to find out. Only Lorelai knew the truth for sure.

Once the shock, the anguish and the hard decision-making was over, Rory had allowed herself to be a little excited and even happy. The baby she was carrying wasn't the result of a brief fling or a one-night stand with a nameless stranger. She had been in a committed relationship with the father and they had loved each other, truly loved each other. There had been many times throughout her pregnancy that she had wanted to pick up for the phone and call Logan but something always held her back. It had felt so final on her graduation day and while she still wanted to believe that he loved her, he had walked away and made no effort to contact her again. He had moved on and she needed to do the same.

Giving birth to her daughter, was, and remained one of the most spectacular experiences of her life, the achievement of which she most proud of, the moment when she felt she truly became who she was destined to be. Luckily for Rory, single mothers and their children were no longer the social outcasts that they had been at the time Lorelai had found herself pregnant and her grandparents were more supportive than she could ever have imagined. She had no money and so she was grateful when they offered her the pool house again as a temporary home. She loved living in Stars Hollow with her mom but it was cramped quarters. Here in Hartford, she had more space and privacy.

For the most part, she was pretty content with her life and the only times Rory had really allowed herself to wallow in her own sadness was when Lily started to achieve her 'firsts' – first smile, the first time she rolled over, the first time she ate baby apple sauce. More often than not Rory found herself alone at these times and it was then that she had to pick up the phone and call someone to share the moment - Lorelai or her best friend Lane. Inevitably they would be out and so they would hear the news by voicemail several hours later when the moment and the excitement had passed. On more than one occasion Rory had sat on the sofa, hugging her knees to her chest, bursting with pride but dripping with tears, wishing that her daughter's father could be her side, to gasp and coo with her at yet another tiny, but momentous development in their baby girl's life but she had resigned herself to the fact that it was never going to happen, because her daughters father had no inkling that she even existed.