“Mom,” I say more firmly. I walk over to the bed and sit next to her. “You feeling okay?” I wait for her to answer, but she’s still sleeping. “Mom, Sutton needs you to get out of bed. I can take her for the day, but…” I reach to shake her, but when my hand touches her shoulder, it’s ice cold. Of course she’s cold. She’s on top of the covers, laying on her stomach. Maybe she had a fever and fell asleep like this.
“Come on.” I try to pull the covers up and over her, but she doesn’t budge. “You’re just going to feel worse if you don’t warm up.”
Reaching over, I twist on the lamp by her bed, hoping the light will wake her. That’s when I notice the blood.
Adair gasps and my hands clutch her hips, feeling the soft, warm skin. I want to bury myself between them and escape, but I can’t escape the past any more than I can change it.
“She was dead,” I say flatly. “Had been for days. Dad hit her with something. They never found out what.”
“And your sister?” Adair asks. “What happened?”
“I took her out for her snow day,” I say.
Her eyebrows knit together. “Did you call the police?”
“Not at first,” I admit. “I didn’t want Sutton to…to see that.”
I close the door behind me, my hands trembling. I feel as cold as she did. Sutton appears in her doorway, beaming like a ray of sunshine. Her jeans are an inch too short and her sneakers have a hole in the toe.
And she’s got no mother.
I push the thought aside and grab her hand. “Ready for our adventure?”
“Yes!” she squeals. She pauses and looks at Mom’s door. “Did you tell her where we were going?”
“Yeah,” I lie. “She knows. Where do you want to go first?”
“The library!”
“Big surprise.” I lead her down the hall, away from the nightmare she’s been living, away from her old life, away from everything she knows, and say a prayer that whatever comes next is better than the hell she’s leaving behind.
“You went to the library?” Adair trips over the words like she can’t fathom it.
“There were computers there, and it’s always warm,” I tell her. “I looked up some addresses. We spent the day together, and then I walked into the closest CPS office.”
“And told them what?” she asks.
“I pulled them aside and said my sister needed to go into custody, that she wasn’t safe at home. There was a really nice woman who got my sister hot chocolate and talked with her.”
“And you?”
“When no one was looking? I left.”
“You left?” Adair repeats like she misheard me. “Where did you go?”
“Where do you think I went? I went home to kill my dad.”
The arms around my neck loosen, and Adair draws back to study my face. “But your dad is alive.”
“What can I say? I’m a crappy murderer.” My attempt to lighten the mood falls flat. It’s not surprising, I guess. “He came home, and I confronted him. I stabbed him with a kitchen knife, but it wasn’t very sharp. He probably would have killed me if the cops hadn’t shown up. CPS alerted them, and they came to do a wellbeing check. I didn’t see my dad again until I testified in court a year later.”
“Is he in jail?”
“Yeah. He deserves to be in hell.”
Adair doesn’t argue against this. She just lowers her face against my hair and holds me close to her. “What about your sister?”
“She was young and adorable, and CPS found her a place to live right away. The family didn’t want an older kid.”
Adair gasps. “So they split you up?”
“It was better for her, anyway. I basically spent the next three years jumping around the system. Anytime things got too comfortable, I’d pick a fight and get sent somewhere new.”
“Until Francie?” Adair guesses.
“The nice woman at CPS with the hot chocolate? Francie’s sister. I kept winding up back at her desk. Finally, she got Francie to take me, and I’ve been with her ever since.”
“She cleaned up your act.”
“It took a while. I caused as much trouble as I could,” I say.
“Why?”
“Because I had this ache inside me and nothing soothed it, but hitting something distracted me. Then, at a party, I discovered drinking,” I confess. “It was like escaping. I found rock bottom at the bottom of a bottle.”
“Francie didn’t give up on you, though?”
“Yeah, I have no idea why.” I still don’t. I never deserved her patience, and I’ve tested it too many times to count.
“Maybe she sees what I do,” Adair says softly.
“A worthless orphan?” I ask. “Or not an orphan, I guess. My piece of shit father is still alive, serving his sentence in upstate New York. I guess I’m a bastard?” I laugh feebly, but she doesn’t join in.
“Don’t do that.”
“What?”
“Talk shit about yourself,” she says. “I forbid it.”
“It’s one of the few things that I’m really good at,” I tell her. “I mean, I’m just like my dad.” I turn my face away, unable to look at her. She deserves love and magic and wonder and a life I can never give her. I’m a black hole, destroying every good thing I encounter, swallowing them up and leaving nothing behind.
“You’re not.” She grabs my chin and forces me to look her in the eyes. “You just have to let yourself believe it.”
“I’m sorry, Lucky. I guess I learned a long time ago to expect the worst in people, especially myself.”
I look into her eyes and find understanding. No, more than that: acceptance.
“We all have our faults,” she murmurs, “and our baggage.”
“Some of us more than others.”
“Tell you what,” she says. “How about when yours starts to feel heavy, you let me help you carry it for a while?”
I stare at her in wonder. She surprises me at every turn. I
