Again.

I break.

*   *   *

It takes forever for me to calm down, for the quiet sobs to stop, for me to relive every second of her walk through the lobby. Over and over, I picture the expression on her face when she glanced at me.

Blank. Polite.

One stranger passing another. She didn’t recognize me. My own mother didn’t know me from a stranger standing in a hospital lobby.

What do they say? That a mother will know her own child even if they’ve been separated?

Bullshit.

My reflection appears in the window behind my chair. I feel drained. Not Sophie. Not Quinn. Not Q. Not anybody.

Six years have changed me, too.

I am hollow.

*   *   *

No eleven-year-old should have to choose between her parents.

After I found Uncle Eddy in my parents’ bed, things changed between my mother and me. The months my father spent in Iraq had anchored me to my mother. She was my ballast—sturdy, strong, balancing the upheaval my father’s absences and reentries blew into our lives.

“You’re too young to understand,” she said that afternoon in the car as we drove home from Carey’s, where she’d found us holding hands on his porch.

I studied the view out the passenger window, wondering what I hadn’t understood. Mom. Uncle Eddy. Naked in my parents’ bed. I was eleven, not stupid.

She kept talking. “I love your daddy, Sophie. You know that.”

She pulled the car into our driveway, and I turned to see her gazing at me, pleading. That look confused me.

“Are you and Uncle Eddy getting married?” I asked.

She recoiled, her eyes round with surprise. It took her two tries to speak. “No! Geez, Sophie, no!”

“Are you and Daddy getting a divorce?” I bit the inside of my cheek so I wouldn’t cry again.

That time she didn’t answer so quickly. Her hands gripped the steering wheel until her knuckles turned white. Her lips—bare of any lipstick for once—tightened at the corners in a tense frown. Finally she said, “I don’t know, baby. I’m not sure we can all keep on like this.”

Her blue eyes blurred with tears, but she no longer seemed bitter. She looked sad. And scared. I’d never seen her afraid. I threw myself against her.

Her arms closed around me, and her sigh lifted my head against her chest. “Oh, Soph.”

“I won’t tell, Mommy. I promise.”

I didn’t know I was lying, but I think she did. She held me anyway.

For the next two weeks we continued living our lives like always. During the hot days, I played with Carey and Blake, returning home dirty and exhausted. Uncle Eddy disappeared, or at least he never showed up when I was around. And my mother . . .

She sat on the porch swing, pushing off the ground with a bare foot, her eyes latched on to something in the distance that I couldn’t see. During dinner I would be telling her about my day, but she was no longer part of my world. She’d become a ghost I couldn’t catch hold of. Worse, she’d made excuses to avoid speaking to my father when he called. Even when they’d fought, she had always spoken to him. Every conversation could be the last. We all knew that. But my mother, she seemed to be slipping away.

I could think of only one person strong enough to make her stay. One person whose word was law in our house. If my father told her to stay, she would do it.

So I broke my promise to my mother.

When my father called home, I told him what I’d seen. He didn’t ask to speak with my mother. He didn’t comfort me. Instead, he told me to get to bed and hung up.

I went to bed, scared I wore my guilt on my skin. That my mother would come to tuck me in and guess what I’d done. But she didn’t come into my room that night, or any other night that week. I started to fear that she would never tuck me in again. She hardly looked at me, but sometimes I would catch her staring at me with great pain, as if she knew I’d betrayed her.

So when she dropped me off at my grandmother’s soon after, I knew she was mad at me. She drove away with Uncle Eddy, and I guessed she was leaving my father.

But I never—not once—expected her to leave me, too.

If only I’d just kept my damned mouth shut.

*   *   *

The longer I sit in the shadows of the hospital lobby, the more the rage expands, stretching into corners inside of me. Questions pile on top of one another in incomplete, incoherent, half-formed thoughts. How could she—? Where have they—? What are they—? Why?

My muscles tighten with the effort to be still when I feel like I could explode and burn the hospital down with Edward inside it.

Surveillance, I decide.

I will stake out the hospital. Every free minute I have, every minute I am not at school or imprisoned in my room, I will be here, waiting for her to return.

Some screwed-up part of me hoped she’d died in a car accident five minutes after she’d driven away. I fantasized that her last thoughts were of me, wishing she’d never left. The stupid daydreams of a naive little girl.

Because the truth is, she really did abandon me. Like I was scum. Like I was NOTHING. Like she guessed I would become Sophie Topper Quinn, town slut. Unworthy of her, the original town slut.

Too damned bad for her.

I have things to say.

And I don’t really give a shit if she wants to hear them.

Chapter Eleven

I don’t tell my father I have seen them. I don’t even consider it. I’m not sure what he would do, if anything, but there is a slim chance he could make them leave. He has power in our world. I will not allow them to leave before I talk to my mother.