“I wanted to know,” I stated. “I felt like I had a right to know about them but not everyone agreed with my approach. Their family—my family members got upset about it and wanted to be left alone, so I haven’t been back.”
“Why didn’t you live with any of them?”
“I did, at first,” I said. “I don’t remember everything but I got all the records of my journey through the CPS system. Right after the car accident, I was placed in the care of my paternal grandmother, but they removed me after a while because she had a bad drug habit. I had just turned two. After that, I moved around to different relatives but there were problems at each place.”
“Like what?”
“Well, I was living with my other grandmother and some cousins, but then her boyfriend got arrested for child abuse. They took me out of there. Eventually, I ended up with one of my aunts and that’s the house I remember the best, because I was with her for several years. But then she didn’t want me anymore, so I moved in with foster parents. It’s much harder to adopt out as an older kid. It would have been better if they’d let me go when I was a baby or a toddler but it was too late.” I shrugged. “I was with a few different foster families before I met my mom. She used to volunteer at an after-school program at the church because she loved kids so much, and she and my dad weren’t able to have any of their own. It took a long time for them to get me but they did and I was so happy that I couldn’t believe it. I literally didn’t believe it, and I thought it was a trick or just…just that someone was going to pull the rug out and I’d end up moving again. I used to leave my classroom to go to the school office to call them, to make sure that they hadn’t run off somewhere. I couldn’t trust that they were real.”
“Yeah.” He picked up the edge of the comforter and dabbed off my cheeks, where a few stray tears had dripped down. “They’re great. I’m glad they did that.”
“It’s so lucky to get people to love you,” I explained. “Lyra will see that when she’s older, too.” But I paused as I considered my statement. “Actually, no, I hope that she doesn’t. I hope that she just thinks that it’s normal to have people feel that way about her.”
“I hope so, too. I hope she never thinks back and wishes that she’d had her jackoff father or her immature mother around. Do you think she will?”
I did my best “serious and honest” expression. “No,” I answered.
“Ok.” He was looking back at me, but I couldn’t tell from his own expression whether he believed me or not. There was something in his face, some emotion, that I couldn’t really define.
“Silas?”
He turned away and I sat up when we heard Lyra’s voice. “What’s up?” he asked her, but she was staring at me.
“What are you doing there?”
“We were talking about today,” I said, and she nodded, accepting it.
“I can’t go back to sleep,” she told us. “I had a bad dream about the cemetery.”
“You did? Come up here,” Silas said, and she jumped onto the bed and scrunched herself between us. “Want to talk about it?”
She shook her head. “It was just scary.”
“Should I tell you a story?” he suggested, and now she nodded. “Ok, let’s see. Let me think.”
“You could read a book,” she said.
“I could do that.” He got up and as I was tucking the comforter around her, he returned carrying a volume that I hoped wasn’t one of her mysteries. “Remember this?” He showed her the cover, and it didn’t look scary at all.
“Yeah, the book about the tollbooth!” she answered, and we both got to hear it read aloud in his deep voice, which was pretty gravelly and also extremely soothing. That was why we both fell asleep, all of us together.
Chapter 14
Unlike other people I knew, Beckett didn’t show very much emotion on his face. My boss’s expressionless expression was something I’d wanted to emulate in my own career, but I had decided that I did better with acting than with blankness. So right now, I was trying to portray “calm and circumspect.” Actually, my thoughts were racing about what I should say.
He had asked for my honest opinion, so I gave it to him…mostly: “Octavia is doing better.”
“Really.” His one word was a statement, not a question, but I still understood that he wanted to hear more.
“Once the Four-Squared project was off her shoulders, she was able to devote more time to everything else and I’ve been satisfied with her work product,” I continued. “I’ve been stepping back with my supervision because I haven’t seen anything that makes me doubt her.”
“Good. I’m glad to hear that.”
I nodded and then I took a breath. It wasn’t a great look to whine to your boss, but I was about to do it. I was going to tell him that taking things away from Octavia had been great for her and better for our clients, but it had created a difficult situation for me—an overworked situation. But again, it was never a good idea to admit to your employer that you wanted to be lazier, so…I took another breath.
Before I had the chance to potentially sink my career, my boss spoke up. “When I came to Whitaker Enterprises, this department was accomplishing close to nothing,” he commented. “It was appalling.”
“I remember how much we had to catch up on,” I said, because those first few months had been a whirlwind of late nights and many stiff necks for me.
