lost cause, I’ll never know. I swallowed hard, trying to scrape up my voice from wherever it was hiding, but I failed.
“This might be a good time for a change in subject,” Steph said. She drained the last few drops of tea from her cup. “You said in the car you had something you wanted to tell us.”
Mr. Glass was still looking at me as if he could read my every secret—and he wasn’t happy with what he was reading. Mrs. Glass, however, looked suddenly uncomfortable and fidgeted with her empty coffee cup. I shared a quick, puzzled glance with Steph.
“Maybe now isn’t a good time—” Mrs. Glass started.
“There never will be a good time, May,” Mr. Glass said gently, which sent a bolt of adrenaline shooting through my veins.
“What’s wrong?” I asked, my voice tight with alarm.
Mrs. Glass was still fidgety, and there was a sheen in her eyes that suggested she was fighting tears, which didn’t make me any less alarmed.
“Nothing’s wrong,” Mr. Glass assured me and Steph, who looked as worried as I felt. “We just have something to tell you.” He gave Mrs. Glass a pointed look, but her eyes were now swimming and she shook her head. He sighed. “We’re not going to rebuild the house,” he said. “Your grandma Rose is getting old, and she’s all alone. Your mother and I have been talking for a long time about moving closer to her.”
Grandma Rose was Mrs. Glass’s mother, and she’d celebrated her seventy-fifth birthday last year, three years after being widowed.
“But Grandma Rose lives in San Francisco!” Steph said in a tone that suggested San Francisco was akin to Timbuktu.
Mrs. Glass rallied her mental forces and cleared her throat. Her eyes were still shiny with tears, but her voice was firm and sure. “We’ve been talking about it ever since your grandpa passed,” she said. “And it feels like the house burning down is almost like a sign from the universe that now is the time.”
Mrs. Glass wasn’t the only one with shiny eyes now. Steph looked completely stricken. Her whole life, she’d never lived more than a half hour away from her parents. She hadn’t even left town to go to college, going to Georgetown because it was close to home. I couldn’t imagine what she must be feeling at the moment.
Actually, I wasn’t exactly sure what I was feeling at the moment. Despite the tears that shone in both Steph’s and her mother’s eyes, I wasn’t feeling inclined to cry myself, nor did I feel the kind of sinking sensation in my stomach I might have expected. My adoptive parents were moving all the way across the country from me. Instead of being able to pop over and see them any day of the week, I would only be able to see them a handful of times a year. They had rescued me from a future that had looked unbearably bleak, and I loved them with all my heart.
And yet at that moment, I felt . . . nothing.
I’d experienced this kind of emotional numbness before. It meant my psyche wasn’t ready to deal with my emotions just yet, so it had shut them down entirely.
Even numb as I was, I understood why my emotions had shut down. Despite all the many years I’d lived with the Glasses; despite the fact that they’d adopted me, and treated me in every way as though I were their biological daughter; despite the fact that even if they were living in San Francisco, I could see them as many times as I was willing to endure the long flight, I couldn’t help flashing back to the many times in my childhood when I’d been abandoned. First, my biological mother had abandoned me in a church. Then foster family after foster family had given up on me and sent me away. The small child who lived in my core felt like she was being abandoned yet again, and it was more than I could deal with.
Steph was openly crying now and had moved to the sofa to hug her mother. I should have made a similar gesture, but I sat rooted in my chair, wondering when the dam within me would burst. Mr. Glass shot me a look of undiluted sympathy as he reached over to pat Steph’s back, and I knew he understood. At least my less-than-normal reaction to the news wasn’t hurting his feelings, and probably wasn’t hurting Mrs. Glass’s, either. They both knew