"No." The word came out harder than I intended. I hated how gentle he sounded. I hated how much I wanted to believe him. "You don't understand."
"Then explain it to me."
Where do I even start?
"Kier?"
My eyes burned. I swallowed hard. "It happened before." The words barely sounded like mine.
Thane's expression shifted immediately. "What happened before?"
I shook my head. The pressure in my chest kept building. "Somebody cared."
"Kieran—"
"She did."
The room blurred slightly. I blinked hard.
"Who?"
For a second, I couldn't answer. Because saying her name somehow made it present. Made me twelve years old again.
"Janelle."
Thane stared at me. Waiting. Completely lost. Which made sense. I'd never told him about her. Never told anybody. Not really.
For years, I'd kept that part of my life locked away. It wasn’t because I'd forgotten it. If anything, the opposite was true. I remembered too much. The problem was that once I started thinking about those years, it was hard to stop.
Thane didn't say anything, but stared at me with a mixture of concern and confusion. Of course, he was confused. As far as he knew, we'd been arguing about hockey and reporters and stupid comments on the internet.
I wasn't sure when the conversation had stopped being about any of those things. Maybe it never had been.
"Janelle was one of my foster parents."
The words settled heavily between us. Even now, I hated saying foster parent. The phrase felt clinical. Temporary. Like a label somebody had stuck onto a relationship that had once meant everything to me.
I stared at a spot on the floor for a moment before continuing. "I met her and her husband, Sam, when I was nine. I'd already been in the system for about a year by then."
My voice sounded distant to my own ears.
"They couldn't have biological children, so it was just the two of them." Memories surfaced unexpectedly. Janelle standing in the kitchen making pancakes on a Saturday morning. Sam pretending not to notice when I stole bacon off his plate. The three of us sitting at the table. It wasn’t anything special, but I’d wanted that for as long as I could remember.
Just ordinary things. The kind of ordinary I'd wanted for as long as I could remember.
I laughed softly, though there wasn't much humor in it. "They were good people."
For years, I told myself that that would have been easier.
The statement felt important. Because they were. This wasn't a story about cruel foster parents or a terrible home or somebody treating me badly.
I rubbed my palms against my jeans. "I lived with them for three years."
Long enough to stop feeling like a guest. Long enough to stop keeping my belongings packed in boxes. Long enough to believe I wasn't leaving.
Thane remained silent. So I kept going.
"They wanted to adopt me."
