1984 - The Caretaker
He gave her two options when she became pregnant with Lutessa.
Pamela could abort the baby and move on with her life. She'd make no contact with the Luthors ever again, for as long as she lived. Her life would, more or less, go back to the way it was before she'd made the wretched choice to follow Lionel into bed. She hadn't felt like she had much of a choice at the time—she was young and naive in the corporate world, and she'd seen the signs of his interest all night at that business party, and she'd taken him up on what seemed like a opportunity she couldn't turn down.
Her other option was to carry out the pregnancy and give the baby up for adoption. If she chose that, Lionel warned, he'd keep Pamela in his sights after the birth. She'd be hired in as a caretaker for his four-year-old son, and she'd keep her silence about what had happened between them, on pain of quietly disappearing in the night along with everyone and everything she loved.
She considered ignoring his threats and keeping her child anyway, and had he been any other man, she might have. But he was Lionel Luthor. Defying him wasn't an option. And Pamela couldn't imagine working alongside a woman and boy whose husband and father she'd slept with—not that she'd known he was married at the time.
She was on her way to the clinic when she felt the second heartbeat inside of her.
Long after her daughter's birth, she learned that although her daughter certainly had a heartbeat by then, that second heartbeat couldn't have been what she felt. It was a pulse in her abdominal aorta caused by increased circulation. Still, it was enough to get her to turn the car around.
Seven months after the day she made her choice, in the few minutes she held her infant daughter in her arms before the social worker came to take her away, she learned what a mother's strength was and could be—that she would never, ever have traded anything for that moment, even though it was the most painful moment of her entire life.
Maybe that was why, when she was first shown her quarters in the Luthor mansion, and Alexander's little curly red head peeked out behind his mother's leg, she fell in love at first sight. A gaping, bleeding hole had been left in her heart; she had love to spare and no one to give it to, and it was burning her to death from the inside. She had half expected to hate the boy merely for having Lionel's blood coursing through his veins, but in that moment, the maternal love that was swelling up inside her overflowed and poured out onto the little boy who stood before her.
"Alexander," Lillian said, reaching back to put a hand on his shoulder, gently nudging him forward, "this is Pamela. She's going to be taking care of you. Can you say hi?"
"Hi, Mama," the little boy said to Pamela, smiling just enough to crinkle the corners of his eyes.
"Oh, I'm so sorry," Lillian said. "He's going through a phase. He calls all women Mama."
"It's quite alright," Pamela said. She kept her voice even, but her heart was positively melting.
No, Pamela Jenkins never truly regretted her decisions. Even the ones that had been wrong.