prologue
Charlie
“Spence,” I wheeze, rising to the very tips of my bare toes. “This one.” I give up when the pain of my big toe grinding into the hard concrete becomes too much. I point upward at the jumbo black bin with a neon-yellow lid—the only tub we haven’t torn apart like ruthless scavengers.
“I forgot what a shortcake you are when you’re not in your bedazzled stage boots.” My big sister Spencer nudges me out of the way with a gentle hip check. She puts her extra three inches of height to good use, and when she rises to her tiptoes, she’s able to wriggle the tub free from where it’s lodged on the wire rack. “I’m pretty sure this is just old clothes, Charlie. Tubs are clothes, blankets, and shoes. All the scrapbooks were in brown moving boxes.”
I shake my head stubbornly. “No, there’s gotta be more somewhere in?—”
Thud!
She drops the bin in front of my feet. In a normal garage, that would’ve caused a dust cloud, but this is Nate’s—my adoptivedad and big sister’s husband—brand-new work garage. The epoxy floors are clean enough to eat off of.
I look to the left, eyeing the candy-apple-red antique sports car with the hood popped. “Nice of Dad to share his new working garage with you to store all of our mom’s stuff.”
The space is massive. It could hold an additional four cars even with the wall of organized boxes, bins, and tubs—evidence of our sentimental hoarding. When Mom passed away, Spencer tucked all of her belongings into a storage unit. From what I remember, the owner of the unit ensured it was free, taking pity on two orphaned sisters. It wasn’t until Spence and I moved to Las Vegas, and she met and married Nate, that we finally had a home big enough to comfortably store all our sacred memories.
Spence has way more than me. She was eighteen when Mom died. I was only five. I should be grateful she remembers so much and I have someone to tell me the stories, but sometimes I resent her for having thirteen more years with Mom than I did. Even though people say I’m Mom’s spitting image, I feel like a stranger wearing her face. That’s why I can't let go of a single shred. It's only paper, but it's all I have. I'm clinging to scraps…it’s all I have. I’m clinging to scraps while my big sister has whole memories.
Dropping to my knees, I grab the yellow tub lid and yank. Finally, the satisfying snaps of the plastic dislodging echo around the room. “Blankets my ass,” I grumble, as the tub reveals its treasures—an entire bin full of loose papers and photographs.
I hold up a list, waving it triumphantly in the air. “See?”
A sweet smile overcomes my sister. God, she’s pretty, especially when she smiles. Curvaceous. Thick, long dark hair, and soft brown eyes. The most beautiful, effortless tan. We look nothing alike. Spencer’s dad is Cuban. Mine? He’s nonexistent. I never knew the guy, and he never wanted to know me. Thecheating bastard. He wasn’t there when Mom needed him. He wasn’t there when I needed him. He’s a ghost I will never let haunt me.
After gracefully dropping to the ground next to me, Spencer folds her legs and begins to sort out papers and pictures. “Mom must’ve never gotten the chance to organize all these. Look at this one.” She hands me a snapshot of Mom in a flowy, floral dress with spaghetti straps, standing next to a brawny man in pitch-black sunglasses. They’re posing in front of a for-sale sign. And behind that stands a small cottage-type house, meager but charming.
“Mom and your dad?”
Spence nods slowly, her eyes shifting as she gets lost in a distant memory. “Mom’s pregnant with me here. They bought this house for me.”
I examine the handsome man in the photograph. His jet-black hair gleams in the Florida sun, and his tan—just a few shades deeper than Spencer’s complexion—stretches across broad shoulders that strain against a crisp white guayabera shirt. His giant brown loafers peek out from beneath pressed khaki pants, completing the quintessential Miami look of a man who knows exactly who he is in the world. His face is partially obscured by those onyx sunglasses, making him seem both present and somehow unreachable at the same time.
“How old were you when he left?”
“Two.” Her eyes fall to her lap. “He found someone else. Love was a game of leapfrog for him. Jumping from one woman to the next. It broke Mom. She really loved him.” Her voice drops to a whisper. “Legend has it, he’s still out there man-whoring around, ruining women’s lives.”
I pat my sister’s knee. “I’m sorry. Poor Mom…poor you.”
“Hey, we were stronger for it.” Reaching over, she taps the top of the picture. “Mom figured it out and raised me in thathouse, all by herself. She did it again when you came along. She always found a way to make the impossible possible. I learned to live by that mantra. It’s why even though everyone with a brain cell said I had no business keeping custody of you when she passed, if she figured it out once…well, so could I.” Her shoulder nudges mine playfully, knocking me sideways. I topple from my kneeling position onto one hip, then cross my legs like hers. The concrete feels less punishing this way.
“Do you regret it?” I ask, half-heartedly, looking around the two-thousand-square-foot garage only a stone’s throw away from the mansion I moved into when I was eleven. Obviously, it worked out.
“Regret what?” she asks mindlessly as she continues to riffle through the tub, pausing on a photograph that catapults her back to what seems like a whole other lifetime.
“Keeping me.”
She turns her head to face me, her lips pursed and one eyebrow raised. “Once.” She can’t hold her scowl long, her teasing smile curling at the corner of her lips.
“Humor me. When did you consider dropping me off at a fire station?”
“When you were seven, we were so broke, I could barely afford our apartment but I won a gift card to Sephora from work around Christmastime. I could finally buy some nice makeup for myself.” She holds up her pointer and middle finger together. “I left you alone fortwo minutes, just to start dinner and you used my brand-new Tom Ford eyeshadow palette for watercolor paintings on the wall.Ooooh, I wanted to…” She chokes the air, conveying her frustration but she pairs it with a soft chuckle. “Back then, sixty dollars for one makeup palette was ludicrous.”
“I don’t remember our lives being so bleak. I never felt poor. I was always okay, Spence.”
She wets her lips before rubbing them together. “Then I did a better job of shielding you than I gave myself credit for.”
The obvious answer is my billionaire adoptive dad saved us. But that’s not the whole story. My big sister was my rock. We survived because of her. Because of how much she loved me.
