Ben Cullen kissed my best friend’s fingertips in the kitchen I had once imagined raising children in, and six months of excuses collapsed inside me at once. I stood in the hallway with my coat still on, watching Jean Harper laugh as if the man touching her belonged to her. Ben looked at her with a tenderness I knew too well, because for four years that look had belonged to me.
Chapter 1
Three days after my parents were buried, my aunt packed my sister’s clothes into the guest room and packed mine into a garbage bag.
I was eight years old, old enough to understand what a funeral meant but still young enough to believe that family stayed together afterward. My eleven-year-old sister, Rachel, stood beside the staircase clutching the stuffed rabbit our mother had given her, her face swollen from crying. Aunt Melissa kept moving through the house with brisk, irritated steps, as though our grief were another mess she had been forced to clean up.
“Where am I sleeping?” I asked.
Melissa stopped folding one of Rachel’s sweaters. She didn’t look at me right away. “You won’t be staying here, Sylvia.”
The sentence made no sense. Rachel and I had slept in the same room since we were little. We had shared Christmas mornings, chicken pox, thunderstorms, secrets, and punishments. If Rachel was staying with Aunt Melissa, then of course I was staying too.
“Where am I going?”
Melissa finally turned around. “There’s a children’s home outside Richmond that can take you for now. A social worker will help find you a permanent family.”
Rachel’s mouth fell open. “You said we were coming to live with you.”
“I said you could live with me.”
“What about Sylvia?”
Melissa’s lips tightened. “I can only manage one child.”
I stared at her. “But I don’t eat that much.”
Rachel began crying again.
Melissa sighed. “That isn’t what I mean.”
Our parents had died on a rainy Virginia highway four nights earlier when a delivery truck lost control and crossed the center line. One moment Mom had been reminding us on the telephone to finish our homework, and the next morning Aunt Melissa was sitting at our kitchen table telling us that neither of them was ever coming home.
Afterward, adults filled the house. They carried casseroles through the kitchen, whispered in hallways, and hugged us until their perfume stuck to our clothes. Everyone kept saying, “You girls have each other.”
Apparently, everyone except Aunt Melissa.
Rachel rushed across the room and wrapped both arms around me. “Take both of us.”
“I cannot,” Melissa said.
“Then don’t take either of us!”
“Rachel, stop being dramatic.”
That was something Melissa said often. Dramatic. Difficult. Inappropriate. She liked everything quiet, polished, and properly arranged, including children.
Rachel had always been quiet. She could sit for an entire afternoon reading beside a window. I was the opposite. I climbed trees, played soccer, laughed loudly, asked too many questions, and once broke my wrist jumping from Dad’s workbench because I had decided the garage needed an Olympic gymnastics competition.
Before the accident, Mom called me her firecracker.
Dad called me Sunshine.
Aunt Melissa called me exhausting.
She crouched in front of me, smoothing the sleeve of my shirt as though that might make what she was saying gentler. “Sylvia, you need people who have more experience with a child like you.”
“A child like me?”
“You’re very energetic.”
“I can be quiet.”
“That’s not who you are.”
“I can learn.”
Her expression changed for half a second. There might have been guilt in it, but if there was, she buried it quickly.
“You’re too much like your parents,” she said.
I thought it was a compliment.
It took me years to understand that she had meant it as a reason to send me away.
Rachel screamed when the social worker came for me. She grabbed my arm so hard her fingernails left half-moons in my skin. Melissa had to pull her backward while I was led out of the house carrying a black garbage bag filled with my clothes.
I turned around before getting into the car.
Rachel was standing at the front window.
Melissa closed the curtain.
The children’s home smelled like bleach, canned vegetables, and old carpet. I cried myself to sleep the first night, staring at the unfamiliar ceiling and imagining Rachel alone in Melissa’s spare bedroom. I wondered whether my sister believed I had left her. I wondered whether our parents, wherever they were, could see what had happened.
Mostly, I wondered what was wrong with me.
Four days later, a staff member named Mrs. Ellis found me sitting beside the playground fence.
“You have visitors,” she said.
I assumed it was Rachel.
I ran inside so fast I almost slipped on the polished floor.
But the couple waiting in the office were Daniel and Carol Bennett, old friends of my parents. I remembered them from summer cookouts and birthday parties. Mr. Bennett had worked with Dad for years, and Mrs. Bennett always brought pecan pie at Thanksgiving.
Carol knelt the moment she saw me.
“Oh, honey.”
I stopped several feet away. By then I had learned that adults could say loving things before sending you somewhere else.
“Where’s Rachel?” I asked.
Carol’s eyes filled with tears.
“She’s still with your aunt.”
“Are you taking me to see her?”
Daniel exchanged a look with his wife. Then he came closer and crouched beside her.
“We came because we heard where you were,” he said. “And because we want to ask you something.”
I tightened my grip on the garbage bag.
Carol reached for my hand but waited until I let her take it.
“Would you like to come home with us?”
I stared at her.
“For how long?”
She swallowed. “If everything works out with the court, sweetheart, forever.”
No one had said forever since my parents died.
My eyes went to Daniel. “You mean adopt me?”
“That’s what we’re hoping.”
“But Aunt Melissa said I’m hard.”
Carol’s face changed.
Not pity. Anger.
“Who told you that?”
“She said I was too much.”
Daniel sat down in the nearest chair and looked straight at me. “Sylvia, listen carefully. You have just lost your mother, your father, your home, and your sister. If you are loud sometimes, angry sometimes, frightened sometimes, or anything else sometimes, that does not make you too much.”
Carol squeezed my hand.
“It makes you a little girl who has been through something terrible.”
I started crying before I could stop myself.
“Why would you want me?”
Carol pulled me against her.
“Why wouldn’t we?”
That evening, I left the children’s home with the same garbage bag I had arrived with.
But this time, somebody carried it for me.
Years later, I would discover that Aunt Melissa’s decision had not been made in a moment of panic after my parents died.
She had decided which sister she wanted long before the funeral.
