Justin put the car in reverse and I watched through water-blurred eyes as my brother and his wife stood on the porch, shrinking in the distance as we backed out of the driveway.

I was breathing into my hands, trying not to hyperventilate.

“That fucking bitch,” Maddy said from the back seat.

“Why the hell would she do this?” Justin asked, turning on the wipers. Dragonflies were all around the car. It was like a sudden swarm of locusts through the blur of my tears.

Maddy handed me tissues from her purse over the back of the seat. “Because she’s a horrible human being.”

“They seemed like nice people,” Justin said. “I don’t get it.”

“They are nice people,” Maddy said.

I couldn’t stop crying. I had never in my life cried like this. I felt like my soul was leaving my body.

How could she have done this? How could anyone be this selfish? This cruel? And it wasn’t just the people she kept me from, or the betrayal of knowing where she was when I was left behind. It was the depth of the deception. The layers upon layers of lies she told to keep me from ever knowing this existed.

If Amber could do this, what else was she capable of?

“I can’t see,” Justin said. “I have to pull over, there’s too many bugs.”

I felt the car drive onto the dirt.

“I can’t breathe,” I cried. “I can’t breathe!”

As soon as Justin put the car in park he was unbuckling himself and getting out to come around to the passenger side. Then he opened my door and lifted me into his arms. “Breathe with me, okay?” he whispered. “In and out. Slow.”

He held me there on the shoulder of the highway while I sobbed into his neck. He held me so tight, it felt like he was the only thing keeping me from falling apart.

“Tell me what I can do,” he whispered.

“You can take me to her.”

Maddy had been right all along. She’d always seen Amber for what she was: someone who destroyed everyone and everything in her path.

My childhood shifted forever in my mind.

My mother’s neglect wasn’t the product of mental illness, or lack of resources, or circumstances beyond her control, the inability to do better. My life was chosen for me.

It was chosen by her.

CHAPTER 41 EMMA

I walked right into Neil’s mansion without waiting for someone to open the door.

Justin and Maddy were waiting in the pool house. They hadn’t wanted to leave me, but I didn’t want an audience.

I stood in the living room for a moment to stare at the incomplete rose wall that I now knew was the banister in Mom’s childhood home. The re-creation of her pretty memories, distorted and beyond salvaging.

All the beautiful things she started, only to abandon.

I turned and went up the staircase to find her, opened the bedroom door without knocking.

The room was a mess again. Three empty wine bottles, along with takeout cups and containers, littered the floor. The bed was in disarray—except for Neil’s side. That was perfectly made.

The bedroom was full of burning candles. At least two dozen. The air was so thick with their scent, it felt like I was breathing perfume. I heard water running in the bathroom and I came around the corner to find Mom in her robe over wrinkled pajamas, scrubbing a shirt in the sink. She glanced at me standing in the doorway. “What are you doing here?” she asked, barely looking up.

It was clear she was still in the depths of whatever crisis she was having. I didn’t care. I had never cared less in my entire life.

I could see myself behind her in the mirror. My eyes were puffy. She didn’t even ask what was wrong. It didn’t even occur to her to see why I’d been crying. It didn’t occur to her that today was my birthday and she’d forgotten, again. But now that seemed perfectly natural. Of course she’d forgotten.

Now I knew what I was worth to her. I truly, truly did. I’d been operating on the belief that I should be the most important thing in her life. How could I not be? I was her baby. I was all she had. So if she mistreated me, it was never for lack of love, because of course she loved me. How could she not? I spent my life excusing the very real evidence that I was nothing to her. I was a gerbil she kept in a too-small cage. A fish in a cup of water. Something to look at and entertain her when she was bored and wanted to play house.

“I met Daniel today,” I said.

She didn’t look at me. She kept scrubbing the shirt in the sink.

“Did you hear me? I said I met my brother.”

“I’m fighting with Neil, I’ve got a headache, I don’t have time for this.”

My nostrils flared. “You will make time.”

“Emma—”

“NOW!”

She tossed the shirt into the sink with a slap and turned to me. “I gave up a baby, Emma. I was fifteen.”

“You said I had no family,” I said, trying to contain my fury. “You lied to me my whole life.”

She went back to the sink.

“You left me,” I said. “You abandoned me. You let me go to strangers.”

She didn’t turn around. “You had a good family. Maddy’s parents wanted to adopt you, but you didn’t want it—”

“I wanted you! I was waiting for you to come back for me!”

She brushed a loose hair off her cheek with the back of her hand. “Well, I wasn’t in a good place. You were better off there. You have a brother. Now you know. He’s nice, you’ll like him.”

I stared at her back in disbelief. “That’s all you have to say to me?”

She ignored me.

“My grandparents died before I ever got to meet them. I lost decades with people who would have loved me. Do you know what I lived through? The things that happened to me in foster care?”

“You think I was in any better place when you were in there?” she said.