“She’ll come home when she’s ready,” Peck says.

The question is, will she be ready in time for me take care of things back home? I need for them to love me and to trust me. Then I need for them to give me money, and I can’t get them to do any of that if they’re not around.

***

I haven’t seen Star since I got here. She refused to come back to the apartment, and she has been away the three days I’ve been here. But Wren has been here. All it took was some reminiscing. Bam. Got her.

“Do you remember the yellow house on Chestnut Street?” I ask her.

Wren blinks her eyes furiously. “Yes, I remember.”

It was the house we lived in when Mom and Dad died. “Dad taught you how to ride that old pink bike on the sidewalk out front.”

“I remember.” Her voice is thick and tight. “That was before…”

“Before they died,” I finish quietly. I force out a laugh. “You scraped your knee when you fell off the bike and you wanted to quit, but Dad wouldn’t let you.”

She chuckles. It’s a watery sound. “He made me get back on it and stay on it until I could ride it around the block.”

“Then they couldn’t get you to come inside for supper,” I remind her. My breath catches at the look of devastation on her face. But I push on. “You wanted to stay outside all night.”

“The streetlights came on and I wanted to keep riding.”

“Dad sat on the porch and counted your laps around the block.”

A tear finally falls over her lashes and my gut twists. “I miss them,” she whispers.

“You got a good family,” I remind her. Not like the one I got.

“We didn’t at first,” she blurts out. Then she looks like she wants to take it back.

I drop the fork I’m holding and it clatters to the tabletop. “What?”

“Our first foster family…” She shakes her head. “Never mind.”

“Tell me,” I say.

“You don’t want to know.”

“I do.” It can’t be as bad as the hell I went through. “Tell me.”

“He was a pedophile, and she was clueless.” She closes her eyes. “Star bore the brunt of it.”

I suddenly want to throw up. “What?”

She nods. It’s a quick jerk. “Social Services took us out of there and we went to a group home. It was better.” She smiles at me. “Then we met Marta and Emilio and they adopted all of us.”

“I didn’t know,” I manage to respond. I can barely breathe, much less speak. No wonder she hates me.

“Star wrote to you all the time. She kept thinking you were going to come and rescue us.” She laughs, but there’s no humor in it. None at all. “That’s why she’s not here. She’s still a little sore over it.”

“If I had known–”

But she holds up a hand and waves it to stop me. “You were a kid.”

“I was glad you didn’t end up where I went,” I blurt out. I want to bite it back as soon as it comes out of my mouth. But it hangs there in the air between us.

She blinks her big brown eyes at me. “Why?”

“It wasn’t good.” I cough into my fist. “He wasn’t good.”

“He was family,” she rushes to remind me.

“There was a reason why Dad didn’t talk to him. Think back. Do you remember Dad ever having anything nice to say about him?”

She shakes her head. “Not really. But there’s a lot I don’t remember.”

“He wasn’t nice or good or kind. And he’s no family of mine. Or yours, for that matter.” I get up and start to clear the table. “Just thinking about him makes me sick.”

“What happened?” she asks from behind me.

“I don’t want to talk about it.”

“Why not?”

I take a deep breath. “He got paid by the state to keep me.” I don’t say more, hoping she’ll draw her own awful conclusions. “I was like their servant. I took care of their younger kids and kept their house clean.” And I took the beatings for the ones who were smaller than me.

“You weren’t an only child, at least,” she prompts. She’s looking for a happy ending, but I can assure her there isn’t one. Not in my uncle’s house.

She sounds so optimistic I almost hate to shatter her illusions. “I took care of everyone. I cooked and cleaned and changed diapers and put the kids on the bus. I nursed fevers and soothed nightmares.” I shiver at the thought of it. “And then they sent me to my room, when my chores were done, while they were a family and I had no one.”

“We didn’t know…”

“No one did.” I shrug and force out a laugh I don’t feel. Just going back to those days in my head makes my skin crawl. “When I was nineteen, I met a man who worked at a church. He had a daughter, and she made everything better. She helped me. We were the same age. Julia.” Just the thought of Julia makes my heart speed up a beat. She’s why I have to go back. She’s why I’m here at all.

“That’s good,” Wren says.

I force my own memories to the back of my mind. “Do you remember the time that you and Star decided to build a tree house?” I ask. I force her to slip back into the memories, and I go with her. And I’m happy for a little while, as I bask in the glow that is my family.