PROLOGUE
Ruby
I hadno recollection of my mother.
If pictures of her hadn’t been gracing the walls of my grandparent’s home or occupying space on the stone fireplace mantel, I wouldn’t have ever known what she looked like.
I also shouldn’t have missed what I never had, but somehow I did.
At least the idea of what a mother should be.
I’d had an inkling of the bond a mother and daughter should possess as I got older and watched all the other little girls at school, parties, and dance classes together with their moms.
My grandmother did everything I believed a mother should and more, but there was still an emptiness carved into my heart created by my mother’s rejection.
She didn’t want me.
Only a few days old and the moment she got out of the hospital she discarded me like gum on the bottom of her shoe, turning me over to my grandparents with papers signed to have them take legal custody of me.
She hadn’t even bothered to give me a name.
It was my Gramps and Grams who’d done the honors. They said with vibrant red hair already sparkling on my head and a feisty attitude, my name should be…
Ruby.
They also said I was their gem so it was a perfect match.
The two of them were so good to me that I felt guilty caring about a woman who never lost an ounce of sleep over me. But they never seemed upset with me over the fact that I thought about her. She was their daughter and she’d left them too. So I knew their hearts had been shattered in a way only a parent could understand.
That was unless you were my mother.
She didn’t possess the genes needed to give a damn. It simply wasn’t in her DNA. She was a woman who left without a backward glance, didn’t call, and never came to see me.
But she had come back.
Only this time it was to drop my eight-year-old brother off on my grandparent’s doorstep. A child that none of us knew about.
I remember the doorbell ringing and hearing my grandfather's voice. It was very late and I was curious, so I crept down the stairs, stopping a few steps from the bottom to see what was going on in the middle of the night.
My breath had left my lungs at the sight of my mother. Sixteen years old and it was the first time I’d laid eyes on her in the flesh. I guess I hadn’t been as quiet as I thought and she heard me because she glanced my way. But she didn’t acknowledge, much less speak to me, and before I could completely grasp the sorrow that sat heavy in my belly, she vanished.
However, the cries that echoed through the house, the ones coming from the young boy who was begging his mother not to leave even after she’d shut the door, went on for what felt like an eternity.
Those sounds would haunt me for the rest of my life.
My grandparents didn’t turn Jett away, hadn’t uttered a complaint about having another child, and showed him just as much love as they had me.
But for my kid brother, at his age, it was harder for him than it was for me to comprehend how his mother could drop him off with people that were strangers to him—even if we were family—then disappear like a ghost in the night, abandoning him. He definitely struggled. He’d known what having a mother was like, even if it may not always have been easy.
I’d heard the stories and life hadn’t been a walk in the park for him that was for sure.
Coping for him came with bitterness and attitude when he thought about our mother because at the end of the day, even when he’d been dumped like an unwanted puppy, he still missed her.
She was all he’d known for a crucial time in his life.
I was a teenager wrapped up in my own life when my brother arrived. But the second I saw him, I vowed to show him love, to take care of him, and to never be someone who deserted him.
The way our mother had.
