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The doors open across the street, and kids pour out into a courtyard, excitedly chattering. I wait for the adults that follow.
Penny is one of the last ones to leave, but there she is, wearing a red shirt and jeans. She’s only forty-eight, and she hasn’t changed much in the last decade, her brown hair, the same shade as mine, tucked behind her ears.
She has other kids now, I learned on Facebook. I have a half brother and a half sister. They’re twenty and eighteen, and the boy, Brandon, has my eyes.
One blue, one brown.
I’d looked at his picture forever, waiting to feel something, a connection, a link.
But he was just a stranger. A boy with my eyes, but a different nose, a different smile, and as I look at Penny now, I realize she’s a stranger, too.
“Family” is a complicated word––more complicated for me than a lot of people, I’d guess. I’ve spent so much of my life trying to figure out what that word even means to me.
Sitting there in that parking lot in Knoxville, though, it all becomes clear. Simple, even.
Jules is my family.
Jules, who sees the darkest parts of me, the worst thing I ever did, and loves me anyway.
Just like I see the darkest parts of her, the worst thing she’s ever done, and love her, too.
She doesn’t know it, though.
Oh, she knows I love her. It’s the rest of it.
The darkest parts, the worst thing.
It took me awhile to put it together, I can admit that.
When she first slid into my life, I mostly thought how stupidly lucky I’d gotten, this gorgeous girl who wantedme,even though I was still the human equivalent of a locked door when we met.
And then, once the sex haze wore off and I started paying a little more attention, I thought maybe I was just being paranoid. Ruby was dead, after all––she couldn’t have had anything to do with this pretty-eyed girl in my bed, in my heart.
But Jules knew things about me she shouldn’t have, things I hadn’t told her. Things that would slip out, like the name of the soccer team I’d played on in middle school, or that I was allergic to cats. I’d thought about how desperate Ruby had been to keep me tethered to her, how no one hedged their bets quite like she did, and how, when I looked into Jules’s eyes, I saw that same deep green, dark enough to seem black, fathomless.
I tried to use the money Ruby had left as little as possible, but you need cash to pay for the best and most discreet private detectives, something Ruby had known when she found Claire Darnell.
My guys found Claire Darnell, too. She was dead by then, but she had a daughter, Linda.
Tragedy stalked the Darnells, though, because Linda had also died––in a car accident in 2011, which had left her nineteen-year-old daughter an orphan.
Caitlin Julianne Darnell.
A real mouthful. Didn’t blame her for switching to Jules, although I still can’t tell you where Brewster came from. Never did figure that part out.
Did Ruby reach out first? Did Jules?
I don’t know.
What I do know is that the great-granddaughter of the man accused of kidnapping my adoptive mother showing up at the shitty wing place where I worked seemed like too big of a coincidence to explain away.
I could tell you that’s why I stayed with her. That I was waiting to see what she’d do. If Ruby had put her up to this, that plan had to be fucking toast now, given that Ruby was dead.
I admit, I was curious.
How long could she keep it up?
Trouble was, I did the dumbest thing I could have, given what I knew.
