road, weaving back and forth in a serpentine pattern. Nut-brown skin and glossy brown hair streaked with copper and gold spoke of days spent in the sun. She appeared happy and well fed. Carefree. She didn’t sit on her seat but balanced on the pedals, humming some tune off-key as she glided. A butterfly girl in the sun.
Her dark eyes caught sight of me, and a knot of dread formed beneath my breastbone. I didn’t want her to see me. My face was hot and throbbed in time to the beat of my heart. It was probably red and swollen at my cheek where my father had hit me. But she didn’t heed my warning glare and rode over.
She had chubby cheeks, a snub nose, and eyes the color of the butterscotch candies our maid Janet sometimes slipped me when no one was looking. And she was bigger than me. By at least a few inches. I knew she’d just moved into the neighborhood.
I knew the house. It was one of a dozen bungalow-style houses built sometime during the 1920s. Nothing like the monstrosity of a mansion I lived in, looming at the end of the road. I’d seen two girls running around on the lawn while their father watered the pink rhododendrons and laughed at their antics.
She was loved.
She looked at me on that first meeting with those strangely golden eyes surrounded by dark lashes. Looked at me like she saw it all: the pain, the isolation, the sadness. I couldn’t breathe from all that looking. This pretty, happy girl on her bike had everything I wanted: a sister, parents who loved her. She belonged in the world, and I didn’t.
Rage choked me, thick as grits sliding off a hot spoon. Stupid boy. Lazy, disrespectful little shit.
She peered at me and seemed to come to some conclusion. “Maybe you’d like a friend?”
A friend. I didn’t have friends. Didn’t want them. Didn’t want her. That choking rage took root and found a voice. I spit it out like bitter blades. “You stupid or something?”
Butterscotch eyes widened in hurt.
Stupid boy.
Stupid.
Stupid . . .
Regret presses in on me. If I could go back to that moment in time, I would. I would have told that sweet little girl yes. Yes, I needed a friend. I needed one so badly. Someone to show me what simple kindness was so I’d know it when I saw it. So I wouldn’t push it away with both hands.
But I can’t go back. I chose the wrong girl to cling to back then. I let my father win, became the stupid boy he so often accused me of being. That boy still lives, grown to a man everyone calls Saint. The devil with an angel’s name.
Everyone except her.
She thinks we’re a mistake. For her, I am one. I understand that now. I don’t want it to be true. But I understand it. And there is only one thing I can think of to fix this. I have to let her know everything.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
Delilah
I flee. To the safest place on earth—my mama’s kitchen.
“Now then,” Mama asks when I’m settled at the battered round oak table I’ve eaten meals on since childhood. “Why are you here looking like someone kicked your dog?”
“I don’t have a dog, Mama.”
Her red lips purse. “It’s an expression.”
“It’s a terrible expression. Who would do that? Why would I want to picture it?”
“Stop evading, Delilah Ann. Out with it.”
I take a deep breath. “I heard from Sam.”
She doesn’t move, but I see the relief in her eyes. “I knew she’d turn up sooner or later. Though I’d hoped for sooner.”
Says the woman who cried on the phone at two in the morning.
“She only called. She won’t tell me where she is.”
“No, I don’t suppose she would.” Mama gets up and starts fussing with the yellow daisies she’s put in a blue-and-white Chinese vase. “Do you know, when she was five, she broke Grandma Maeve’s Waterford punch bowl and hid in the attic all day rather than come out and face the music? Scared the bejesus out of us until we found her. Lord, but she was defiant, even then. Not a lick of remorse.”
“I don’t remember that.”
“Likely you were too young.” She tucks a daisy farther into the vase. “I believe we distracted you by putting on The Lion King.”
“That movie always made me want to cry,” I whisper, wanting to cry. But the tears won’t come. At this point, they’d be a relief.