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looked tired, but also like she was gearing up for a fight. Not
with Cassia, but with herself. Cassia knew this wasn’t the
beginning of that struggle. Adalynn had to have been battling
herself for years.
“You did make a choice. You chose living over not living.
You chose to go out alone, no matter how hard that would be,
instead of staying with your family, with the familiar. I can’t
imagine it’s easy for you to know that you can’t contact your
sisters.”
“No,” Cassia confessed. “That’s been the hardest part. I
miss them a lot.”
Adalynn curled her fingers around the mouse, but she didn’t
click anywhere. She didn’t even turn her face back. Her lips
were set in a grim line and her eyes stayed lowered. “When I
was little, my mom told me something that’s always stuck with
me. She was drunk, of course, when she said it. She was
always drunk. We had this terrible one-bedroom apartment.
She’d have an endless string of boyfriends. A lot of them were
drug users, and sometimes she’d use too. She hardly ever
worked. I mean, how could she keep a job?
“The apartment was grimy, always a mess. Dark and stale.
There was never any real food in the fridge or cupboards.
When I was fifteen, I got a job working at a fast-food place not
too far from where we lived. Staff got one free meal per shift,
so at least I got to eat there. I had some of my own money,
which I always kept locked in my locker at school, so my
mom couldn’t get it. I don’t even know if she knew I was
working. Anyway, one day, I bought some groceries, and as I
was putting them away in the fridge, my mom stumbled in,
wasted, and asked me where I’d got them. She asked me if I
