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Our granny wasn’t well enough to watch us more than a night here or there, so we got kicked into the foster system. My baby sister Jordan was only two when we lost our parents. Imagine that shit.
I wished I could say we at least had each other to lean on. But we didn’t. Damian and I got shipped off to one home, Kaylee and Jordan to another.
Damian and I saw it all in the first two years of foster care. Shit I still don’t even want to talk about. Foster farms is what we called them—parents milking the system for the benefits while the kids lived like rats in a hovel. I learned real quick how to fend for myself. Damian and I stuck together like glue. We watched each other’s backs in each new school or when the foster farm had older kids who were punch happy.
Damian was always on the front line, finding the compromise, negotiating for extra snacks, reeling things in when I got too mouthy with the new moms and dads or siblings. Even at age nine, he felt like he had to find the way. He was a year older than me, so he took the protector role seriously, like those eleven months between us meant he had to be the man of our broken family. But no nine-year-old should have to shoulder that shit.
By the time we landed in Trace’s family, we were predisposed to fighting. To tension. To absolutely batshit unstable foundations. It took us a minute to adjust to the stability. Took us even longer before we realized Trace was an ally, not an enemy.
From love, to broken, to love again.
I wish I could say the same for my little sisters.
There’s not much that’ll make me break down in life. But when I get to thinking too much about the fate my little sisters were handed because of the foster system, it sends me into a spiral. Because that same system saved us.
How could the same system deliver both salvation and ruin?
These are the questions I don’t share with a fucking hook-up. The questions I can’t even bear to speak out loud. Cora was the only one who ever knew about my sisters, besides Trace and Damian.
My sisters were why the three of us diverted every spare investment dollar back into supporting foster kids, families in need, and children who’d lost everything and needed a North Star.
We got lucky and found North Stars. Jordan and Kaylee never did.
We were able to stay in touch with our sisters, but only sporadically. There was never any rhyme or reason to when we could make contact with them. Once we’d gotten settled in with the Fairchilds, Mama Deb and Papa Gary tried to track down our sisters and add them to our family—even though the addition would have pushed the financial scales way out of balance. But they tried. Bless ’em, they tried.
For a brief period in high school, the four of us were in the same school system. Damian and Trace and I were seniors, Kaylee was a sophomore, and Jordan was in seventh grade. Damian and I made sure to meet Kaylee every morning by the doors, walk her to homeroom, talk about what was going on in her life. But by that point, at fifteen, she was acting out like crazy. Coming to school looking wrecked or tweaked out, her blonde hair matted, eyeliner smeared. She’d brag about trying drugs or hooking up with men in their twenties.
But we didn’t give up on her. Hell, I felt guilty because our foster parents rocked, and hers clearly sucked. Kaylee told us that her foster parents blamed her, but Kaylee was the true victim. She made one wrong friend or hooked up with one wrong guy. We’ll never know who it was that finally pushed her into the sex trafficking world. But by March, she’d stopped coming to school.
The only way we could learn any information was when we were able to intercept Jordan at her middle school. We’d stop by early with donuts, hoping to run into her. Jordan barely recognized us the first time we caught her. We were only her big brothers in theory. She’d sit with us with the saddest eyes, picking at her donuts, keeping all her secrets wrapped up inside her.
Once Damian and Trace and I graduated, Kaylee’s cell phone number stopped working, and we found out that Jordan had been transferred to another school systemagain.
We never found Kaylee again. Not until her obituary hit the newspapers our freshman year at Columbia. Jordan just disappeared. We never found an obituary, but we knew she might have met a similar fate. We suspected their foster parents had been the link to the sex trafficking world.
Where would they be now if they had somehow escaped the system?
Our success had to be doubly big, doubly grand. We weren’t just building our own legacies. We were achieving for the family we’d left behind. No, the family that had been ripped from us.
I spent too long stewing in my thoughts. Some days, it felt like the past would never leave us. Fuck, I’d tattooed it onto my body. Itdroveus.
Even Trace. That big-hearted genius. Of course he’d adopted our mission statement without question:help change the lives of the most vulnerable. He hadn’t suffered the way we had, but he would fight for the future of forgotten and abandoned kids all the same.
Once three o’clock rolled around—a full hour after Trace’s appointment with Cora was slated to start—I started to itch. I waited for a text from Trace, but nothing came. I could feel down to my bones that Cora was still in the building, though the thought made me crazy. I had to get out of my office.
I told myself it was not because I wanted to glimpse her again.
I was fucking kidding myself. That traitorous siren was gorgeous, more so now than ever before. Which meant it was even more important that I stay the fuck away from her.
Even after all these years apart, she still made my cock sit up and beg. I’d never liked the looks of anything more than Cora Margulis.
I walked through the wide, airy halls of our office suite. My office was tucked into one corner, not unlike Allan Margulis’s corner office that had wowed me all those years ago. Assistants nodded at me. Employees scampered. Everything was bustling. Active. Productive. Just the sort of thing you like to see when you take a casual stroll to Trace’s side of the building.
“Hey, Axel, can you—”
“Not now.” I held up my hand to quiet Francis before he could derail me. There was always something needing my attention. Right now, only one thing mattered.
I passed Damian’s office. The door was shut, which meant he was probably balls deep in coding. As I neared Trace’s office, my heart rate picked up. The door was closed.
