Chapter 11
CHAPTER ELEVEN
ANDI
Icall Linda first.
Not Sam. Linda. I’ve learned over two years that Linda is where the family’s heart lives, and Sam is where its hesitation lives. If I want a yes that holds, I need to start with her.
She picks up on the second ring.
“Andi.” Warm. She always sounds warm. It used to make me careful. Now I know it’s genuine, which is almost harder.
“I need to talk to you and Sam,” I say. “Together. Can I come over?”
“Of course. Tonight?”
“Tonight.”
When I get there, Sam opens the door.
He looks the way he always looks—composed, measured, with the polish of a man who has spent his life in rooms where composure matters. But there’s something underneath it when he sees me. There has been since the gala. An awareness that the distance between us has never been fully named.
“Andi,” he says. “Come in.”
Linda squeezes my arm once—her version of a full embrace when she’s reading that something serious is coming.
We sit in the living room. Kelly is upstairs—I hear music faintly through the ceiling coming from her room. Sam and Linda are across from me. Everyone here knows a question is coming.
“I need to talk to you about a girl,” I say.
“Her name is Deja. She’s fifteen. She’s been coming to the center every day for four months.
” I pause. “She’s been sleeping wherever she can find shelter for three years.
Abandoned buildings. People she knows. She ran from a foster placement when she was twelve. ”
Linda closes her eyes briefly.
“Why did she run?” Sam asks.
I look at him directly. “Because the adults responsible for her safety sold her to people who had no business being near her. She was eleven when it started.” I hold his eyes. “The same network that’s been targeting me. The same people.”
The room is quiet.
“I’m asking you to consider taking her in,” I say. “Not as a project. Not as a cause. As a daughter who needs somewhere that is actually safe, with people who have already proven they understand what that means.” I look at Linda. “Like you did with Kelly.”
Sam is quiet for a long moment.
“Andi,” he says. “Before we talk about the girl—I need to say something.”
I wait.
“What I did.” He looks at his hands. Sam Woods, who has never looked at his hands.
“The investigator. Your records. I told myself it was due diligence. That I was protecting the family’s interests.
” He looks up. “It was wrong. It was a violation of something that wasn’t mine to touch, and it caused harm, and I’ve wanted to say that to you directly for two years, and I haven’t found the way. ”
The room is very still.
“The thing is,” he says, “I now understand what those records mean. Not only for you, but for anyone who’s experienced what you’ve been through.
The system determines your limits. It also chooses which version of your history others can see.
Essentially, the system weaponizes your past against you.
” He pauses. “I’ve done the same. I disguised it as something different, but it’s the same thing. ”
I look at him.
“You’re telling me this now because of Deja?” I ask.
“I’m telling you this now because you came to this house and asked us to protect a child,” he says. “And I can’t say yes to that honestly without acknowledging what I did to you.”
Linda has her hand on his arm. Not restraining—steady.
I think about what it cost him. Sam Woods, who measures words the way he measures risk.
This isn’t calculated.
“I know you’re not that person,” I say. Finally. To his face. “I’ve known for a while. I just needed to hear it.”
He nods once.
“Tell us about Deja,” Linda says.
So I do.
Kelly comes downstairs while I’m still there. She stops in the doorway, reads the room, and starts to retreat.
“Stay, sweetheart,” I say. “I need to ask you something.”
She comes in and sits on the arm of the couch beside Linda, facing me.
Her features have changed with age, but even more so with the care and love she’s received since she moved into this home.
She’s still my little sister from Jackson’s house, but she’s much more than that now.
She has Luke and Brandon, older brothers who love and protect her.
She has Sam and Linda, who have shown her nothing but pure love and support since the moment they took her in.
She has Alicia, another sister who loves her and takes her on shopping sprees, and Greg, a brother-in-law who teases, spoils, and loves her just as Luke and Brandon do.
She finally knows she is loved. And it shows in everything Kelly is.
“There’s a girl at the center,” I say. “Her name is Deja. She’s your age. She’s been through some things that are hard to talk about, and I’ve asked her to consider coming here, and she’s thinking about it. But she doesn’t trust adults right now.” I look at Kelly. “With good reason.”
Kelly is very still.
“I wondered if you’d be willing to talk to her,” I say. “Not to convince her to do something she doesn’t want to do. Just to be someone who came through the system and is standing on the other side of it.”
Kelly looks at Sam and Linda. Something passes between them that I can’t fully read but understand.
“Yeah,” Kelly says. “I’ll talk to her.”
Deja comes back to me two days after our conversation about Kelly.
Not to talk about it. She comes in, helps with the afternoon program, and does her homework. I don’t push. I told her to take whatever time she needed, and I meant it.
It’s nearly five o’clock when she appears in my office doorway.
“The people you mentioned,” she says. “Sam and Linda.”
“Yes.”
“Kelly lives there with them?”
“Yes, she does.”
She looks at the window. At the activity room, the homework tables, and the door that faces the street. She’s been coming through that door every day for four months. It’s the closest thing to hers that she has. It’s the closest thing to a home she’s known for far too long.
“Can we go over there now?” she says.
I observe her, recognizing the unique courage of someone who has understood that waiting doesn’t improve safety; it merely prolongs the wait.
“Yes,” I say. “We can go now.”
I call ahead to give Linda a heads-up, but not too early.
Sam answers the door. Linda steps out of the kitchen, drying her hands on a dish towel—her calm and unhurried demeanor reflecting someone who has been cooking without rushing.
Kelly sits on the couch as we step through the door, then stands to follow us when we move into the kitchen.
I introduce Deja to Sam, Linda, and Kelly—brief, not overwhelming.
Linda has made something that smells like the whole house knows someone is coming.
Then I do something that costs me, because every instinct says to stay and manage the room.
I find a reason to be somewhere else. If I’m there, the conversation is about me. And this needs to be about Deja.
After a little while, I hear the back door open and then close. A quick glance out the window confirms that Kelly and Deja are in the backyard.
I don’t know what they say. I’m not supposed to.
What I know is that they’re out there for two hours, and when they come back in, Deja’s posture is different. Not relaxed because Deja doesn’t relax. But something has shifted. The half-step back she keeps between herself and every adult in her life is slightly smaller.
Kelly looks at me from across the kitchen.
I look back.
She gives me the small nod that means, She’s okay. Give her time.
KELLY
I don’t know what Andi told her about me.
I don’t ask. I just take her out to the backyard because, inside, there are too many adults, and having adults in the same room for this conversation would make it impossible.
We sit in the backyard oasis that Andi helped create for a while without saying anything.
I’ve learned that silence tells you what someone is carrying without requiring them to hand it to you directly.
Deja is carrying a lot.
“How long have you been here?” she asks eventually.
“Almost two years.”
She nods. Processing.
“Did you want to come?” she asks.
The question cuts straight to it. I like that.
“No,” I say. “I was terrified. I’d been in seven placements before this one.
I was good at making myself useful fast and invisible faster, and I thought if I could just be small enough, nobody would have a reason to move me again.
” I look at the yard. At the garden Linda has been fussing over all summer.
“I didn’t know how to be somewhere permanent. I didn’t trust it was real.”
Deja is very still.
“What changed?” she asks.
I think about the real answer, not the easy one.
“I watched them choose me,” I say. “Not because I was useful. Not because I performed well. They had a dinner where things went wrong—I was upset about something, I don’t even remember what—and I was terrible company.
And they didn’t treat me any differently afterward.
” I pause. “That was the first time someone didn’t treat me differently after I stopped performing. ”
Deja looks at her hands.
“Andi,” she says. “You trust her?”
“Yes,” I say. Without hesitation.
“Why?”
“Because she helped when everyone else looked away,” I say.
“Before anyone asked her to. Before she and Luke had worked everything out. No matter what it cost her.” I look at Deja.
“She was my sister in the house I lived in before this one. She protected me then. She’s never once tried to manage what I can handle.
She just tells me the truth and lets me decide.
Then she’s there to help me work through it however I need her to. ”
Deja is quiet for a long time.
“I saw her having coffee with someone,” she says. “Someone I recognized. I thought—”
“I know,” I say. “She told me.” I pause. “Did she explain?”
“Yes.”
“Do you believe her?”
A long pause.
“I’m trying to,” Deja says.
“That’s enough,” I say. “That’s all you need right now.”
We sit in the backyard for another hour. At some point, she says, “I’ve been sleeping in a building on Pryor Street. There are four of us. We have a system.”
“Okay,” I say.
“It’s not that bad.”
“I believe you,” I say. “But it’s also not that good.”
She almost smiles.
“No,” she says. “It’s not that good.”
Then we go back inside together.
ANDI
She finds me in the kitchen before I leave.
Not Kelly—Deja. She’s been quiet since they came back inside, standing slightly apart from the room the way she always does, watching how people move around each other.
“The room Linda showed me,” she says.
“Yes?”
“Is it—is that the one?”
I look at her. “It’s yours if you want it.”
She looks at the floor for a moment. Then, she continues, “I have some things. On Pryor Street. I’d need to go get them.”
“I’ll take you,” I say. “Tonight, if you want.”
She’s quiet. Processing something she’s been holding for three years—the weight of someone who has learned not to put things down because you might need to move again.
“Okay,” she says. “Tonight.”
The building on Pryor Street is exactly what she described—abandoned, structurally intact, the kind of place that four teenagers with a system can make work when the alternative is the shelter that reports to the system.
She goes in alone, and I wait in the car, giving her the time and space she needs to breathe while she collects what little belongings she owns. She comes out seven minutes later with a backpack and a plastic bag. That’s everything. Three years of surviving, and it fits in one trip.
She gets in the passenger seat. I don’t say anything about the bag. I don’t say anything about the building. I just drive.
When we pull up to Sam and Linda’s, the porch light is on.
“They left it on,” she says.
“Linda always leaves it on,” I say.
She looks at the house for a moment. At the light.
Then she picks up her bag, and she gets out.