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“I’m not here to ask permission, Sasha. I have to spend the rest of my life making decisions without you, and this is the first one. Elijah spent twenty years missing out on knowing you. On knowing anything. I’m not going to let him spend five more years rotting in jail and missing out on more.”
I stand up and brush the dirt off the back of my dress pants. My teeth chatter from the cold, but there’s probably some apprehension mixed in as well. “I hope I have your permission,” I say as a lump rises in my throat.
“But if not … I hope you’ll forgive me.”
Chapter Twenty-Nine
There is no time to come up with the perfect way to betray my best friend and tell her parents about their daughter’s last wish. And even if I had come up with a plan, if I’d worked up some epic speech to give them, I’d no doubt botch the entire thing.
With this in mind, I don’t even call Mrs. Cade to announce my unexpected visit. I just show up and knock on the door.
Mr. Cade answers. Instead of a hello, I say, “Good. You’re home.”
“Raquel?” When I give him a tight smile and walk right past him into his own house, he stares at me like I’ve lost my head. “Is everything okay?”
“No, sir. Everything is not okay. Where’s Mrs. Cade?”
“I’m right here, hon.” Sasha’s mom appears on the other side of the foyer, patting her hands dry on her apron. She gives me a once-over, maybe checking for bullet holes or black eyes, and then her gaze settles on my thumb picking the nail polish from my index finger. “What’s going on?”
“I need to tell you something,” I say, turning to Mr. Cade. “And I need your legal services. Pro bono, if possible.”
If I’d had a plan, maybe that wouldn’t have sounded so insane.
“Why don’t we sit in the den,” Mr. Cade says, ushering us into the adjoining room. As soon as they’re seated on a high-backed antique couch, I take a deep breath that does nothing to settle my nerves and sit in the chair across from them.
“Sasha has a biological brother.” I study my chipped nail polish, giving them a moment to react to the news they technically already know.
Mr. Cade clears his throat, and I hold up a hand, cringing at how rude I’m being to the wealthiest and most dignified man I know. “Please. Just let me get this out before you say anything.”
Nerves twist my stomach into knots, but I stay strong, for her. “Sasha found her brother a few months before she died. They talked online but she never met him in person. She saved that for me. We’ve been going around doing these little adventures for Sasha so that he can learn about her life and about who she was before she got cancer.”
I turn to Sasha’s parents, who are watching me with identical expressions.
“What’s his name?” Mrs. Cade says, wiping a tear from her eye.
“Elijah Delgado.”
They exchange a glance, one that I guess only makes sense when you’ve been married to the same person for twenty-five years.
Mr. Cade clears his throat. “Why do you need legal help?”
I want to look away, but I need to be confident. “Elijah is in jail, but it’s not his fault.” I swallow. “He was never adopted, and he aged out of the system. He had absolutely nothing, and because of that, he went to live with some guys he met. They happened to be drug dealers, but he didn’t have anything to do with the drugs. Now he’s in jail because of it, and his public defender doesn’t give a crap about him. He’s looking at five years for something he didn’t even do.”
Again, they exchange a look, only this time I see something like regret in their eyes. Sasha’s mom covers her face with her hands, her weeping growing louder until Mr. Cade wraps his arms around her. He strokes his wife’s hair, and I look away, allowing them a private moment.
“Walter, we should have done something,” she says.
“There was nothing we could do.” He shakes his head. “It would have been a legal nightmare. We didn’t want that, remember? We wanted a closed, drama-free adoption.”
Mrs. Cade dabs at her face with the bottom of her apron, and then she turns to me. “We knew about him. He went into the same agency a few months after Sasha did, but it was by court order, not by choice. His dad kept fighting to keep him, even though his mother wanted to surrender him at the same time she surrendered Sasha. About a year after we adopted Sasha, they called us and said her biological mother had died from an overdose and the biological father had lost temporary custody again and was looking at jail time for drug use. But he wanted an open adoption.”
I watch her so intently I forget to breathe. I see the pain in her eyes, the regret notched in her forehead. Her gaze drifts downward, and she presses her hand flat to her chest. “We said no. Walter was a new attorney and we weren’t well off back then. Adopting Sasha drained all the money we had at the time. We couldn’t afford the paperwork for another child and” — she exhales forcefully — “we knew we didn’t want an open adoption. We also didn’t want someone who was an addict in our child’s life, and the boy — Elijah — he was already a toddler. He wanted his dad more than adopted parents, and we didn’t want to risk losing him and then Sasha to the allure of their real father.”
“We looked for him a few years later, thinking maybe we could get the kids together for a playdate,” Mr. Cade says. “But when I found him, he was in a group home. Not even ten years old, and already suspended from school for smoking pot with a few junior high kids.” His lips were pressed together, his jaw tight. “It’s a shame, it really is, but we couldn’t have someone like that around Sasha. For all we knew, he was on the same path as his dad.”
Mrs. Cade can’t even look me in the eyes. She runs her fingers across an embroidered rose on her apron. “I felt awful, Raquel. I really did. But I didn’t want to share my daughter with someone who didn’t even want her. And taking in another child we couldn’t afford when we knew his history was just too big a risk.”
Here’s the thing about hearts: they can hurt even when they’re already broken. “Please,” I say, fingernails digging into my palms. My chest feels like it’s been ripped wide open, and all they’re doing
