always caught Eva’s eye, snagging her attention like a sharp fingernail, scraping her in places that should have healed over long ago.
She knew only two things about her mother: her name was Rachel Ann James, and she had been an addict. The information had arrived unexpectedly in a letter from Sister Bernadette in Eva’s sophomore year of college. The page had been filled with her precise cursive, so familiar it had lifted her up and carried her back in time to the girl she’d once been.
It had felt like an intrusion, the answers to questions she’d long since given up asking, suddenly landing in her mailbox. Just when she was beginning to feel like she might be able to rise above who she’d always been.
Eva had no idea where that letter was now. Tossed into a box or buried in a drawer. It was easier to pretend that part of her life had never existed, just a few short miles away in San Francisco, that she had instead emerged, fully formed, the day she started at Berkeley.
* * *
She tore her eyes away from the kids and walked the final few yards to where Dex sat.
“Happy birthday,” she said, handing him the package of pills.
He smiled and tucked it inside his coat. “You shouldn’t have.”
She sat next to him on the bench, and together they watched the kids play—jumping from the slide, chasing each other around the swings—always lingering for a little while, just two friends enjoying the sunshine. Dex’s mantra so many years ago now their routine—You only look like a drug dealer if you behave like one.
“I did my first solo deal at this park,” Eva said, pointing toward the parking lot. “When I got here, there were two police cars parked at the curb, the officers standing next to them, as if they were waiting for me.”
Dex turned to face her. “What did you do?”
Eva thought back to that day, how scared she’d been, how her pulse had raced and her breath shortened when she’d seen them, in full uniform, all guns and billy clubs and shiny badges. “I remembered what you told me, about how I had to walk with confidence, how I had to keep my eyes straight ahead and not hesitate.”
Eva remembered passing the officers, meeting their eyes for a fleeting second and smiling through the fear, before walking toward the playground, where a third-year law student was supposed to meet her. “I imagined I was someone who worked in a windowless office, coming here to get a little sunshine and fresh air on my lunch break.”
“The advantages of being a woman.”
Eva didn’t feel like it was much of an advantage, but she knew what he meant. People who looked like her didn’t make or sell drugs. They were teachers or bank tellers. They were someone’s nanny or mother. She remembered the moment when she handed over the drugs and pocketed her first two hundred dollars, how awkward it was. She had no finesse, the entire transaction silent and stilted. She remembered walking away and thinking, It’s done. I’m a drug dealer. And feeling like the person she was only just starting to become had died.
But she’d gotten over it. Embraced what her life had become. A part of her was set free—all those years of conforming to the expectations of others. She’d been told that life was a single track, carrying you forward. If you worked hard, good things happened. But she’d always known it was more like a pinball, careening and racing. The thrill was in the unexpected. In the freedom to create her own destiny. Her life had turned to shit, and yet she’d made something out of it. That was fucking something.
Dex interrupted her thoughts. “I sometimes regret getting you into this. I thought I was helping, but…” He trailed off.
Eva picked a splinter from the table and held it between her fingers, studying the wood before dropping it to the ground. “I’m happy,” she said. “I have no complaints.”
And it was mostly true. She looked at Dex, the one who had stepped into the wreckage of her life and pulled her out. It had been Wade Roberts’s idea to make drugs in the chemistry lab her junior year of college. But Eva had been the one with the skills. The one who said yes when she should have said no.
She tried hard not to think of that day in the dean’s office, of the way Wade had slipped past