Chapter 41

Chapter 42

Chapter 43

Chapter 44

Chapter 45

Chapter 46

Chapter 47

Chapter 48

Chapter 49

A Note from the Author

Also by Beth Orsoff

About the Author

Chapter 1

This was the second time in my life I was entering the iron gates of the Wellstone Center. The first time I arrived in the back of an ambulance. Today I drove through the entrance in my own car, but my heart was still pounding so hard it felt like it was going to burst through my chest.

My first visit to the Wellstone Center had been nearly six months ago when I was admitted on a seventy-two-hour involuntary hold. Back then I hated everything about the place. Today, as a visitor instead of a patient, I could at least appreciate the facility’s beautiful park-like grounds.

The only person in the world for whom I would voluntarily return to the Wellstone Center was MJ. He and his sister Sofia needed a ride. Today was their first visit with their mother since she’d left their apartment six months ago and never returned. After Maria was arrested for drug possession with intent to sell, she was given a choice between jail or rehab. That’s how she ended up at the Wellstone Center. Once she detoxed, they moved her to the Wellstone Center’s residential facility where she was allowed to have visitors. When I arrived at the Wellstone Center after my failed suicide attempt, I’d been housed in a different wing of the complex, but all the programs shared the same grounds.

I checked us in at the front desk, then sat with MJ and Sofia on the patio while we waited for their mother to appear. I wasn’t sure Maria would want to meet me. I didn’t know how much she’d been told but, surely, she knew I had forged a relationship with her children and I saw them whenever I wanted. That fact alone might make her hate me. If she also knew at one time I’d enquired about terminating her parental rights and adopting MJ and Sofia, that would seal the deal.

But my plans had never progressed that far. I had to foster before I could adopt, and that’s where my plan hit a snag. The State of California doesn’t allow people who recently attempted suicide to become foster parents, go figure. Which is how my Aunt Maddy had ended up becoming MJ and Sofia’s foster parent instead of me. My plan worked well for a while until Maria resurfaced and the whole thing blew up.

MJ and Sofia had new foster parents now. Tim and Richard fostered four other children in addition to MJ and Sofia, so they knew how the system worked. Tim and Richard were loving foster parents, the kind they made movies about. Although I guessed they made movies about the other kind of foster parents too. Just different movies.

But with so many kids to care for Tim and Richard never had enough time. They were thrilled when I offered my help, which is how I ended up driving MJ and Sofia to the Wellstone Center today. Tim and Richard were so appreciative of my assistance they routinely invited me over to their house. And I loved spending time there. With six kids, two dogs, one cat, and a gecko, their home was always lively. And loud. Which meant, as much as I enjoyed being there, I was always happy when the evening ended, and I could return to my own quiet house. The constant chaos of their home made me appreciate living alone again.

Yes, I was living on my own again. After MJ and Sofia moved out of my aunt’s house, I did too. I still missed my husband Jonah and my daughter Amelia every single day—it was a loss I knew I’d never get over. But having grown up as an only child, I was used to spending time alone and I sometimes craved that solitude. Plus, living in my house again gave me more time to search for whatever Jonah had been up to before he died.

Ever since my aunt found the flash drive taped to the bottom of the diaper caddy, I’d been trying to unlock it. Jonah had password protected the damn thing, so I still had no idea what was on it. I’d spent endless hours trying to guess his password, without success. I’d also spent entire days scouring the house for a scrap of paper where Jonah might’ve written the password down. No luck so far, but I was not giving up. I’d never give up.

My therapist Dr. Rubenstein thought I was using the flash drive as a way to distract myself from dealing with my grief. Occasionally, I entertained the notion that she was right, but it never stuck. So, I routinely vacillated between thinking Jonah was perfect and I’d never meet a man that wonderful again and believing my dead husband was a deceitful bastard and our whole marriage had been a sham. But I never stopped aching for Amelia. Over time my memory of the sleepless nights, the steady stream of spit-up, and the nonstop crying faded and all I remembered was my overwhelming love for her and my grief at her loss.

But I knew from experience dwelling on the past was not good for my mental health, so I pushed thoughts of Jonah and Amelia aside and tried to be mindful and focus on the present. I took a deep breath and inhaled the scent of freshly mowed grass and focused my gaze on the tree line which acted as a barrier between the Wellstone Center’s lawn and the steep hillside that led to the freeway below. Beyond the trees I glimpsed the hills on the opposite side of the freeway, which six months ago had been charred and barren from the fires but were now covered in California’s ubiquitous coastal sage scrub.

I’ve never liked sage scrub. It’s too, well, scrubby looking. I prefer soft, papery bougainvillea, which is equally ubiquitous in Southern California despite it not being a native plant. Although to be fair to sage scrub, the pink and purple hued bougainvillea were pretty, but when the rains came, those flowers were useless. It was the ugly sage scrub that kept the mudslides at bay—at least until the fires burned it all away. But the sage scrub always grew back.

That seemed like a metaphor for something, although I didn’t know what. Life finds a way? Nah, that was a line from Jurassic Park, which I re-watched last night with Tim and Richard and four of the kids. We’d waited until the two youngest children went to bed because Richard thought watching dinosaurs devour people might scare them. These kids had probably seen worse in their real lives, but I didn’t say so.

I was still thinking about the movie when the door to the Wellstone Center swung open and two women walked out onto the patio.

“Mama!” Sofia shouted and ran to the woman not wearing a white lab coat.

Chapter 2

Sofia threw her arms around her mother’s waist, and Maria bent down and buried her face in her daughter’s dark, silky hair. Maria was wearing baggy gray sweatpants and a white T-shirt that hung loosely on her gaunt frame, and I wondered if they were her own clothes or something the Center had given her from the lost and found box. I would never have recognized Maria from the photos MJ had shown me of their family in happier times, but standing next to Sofia, I could see the resemblance.

MJ stood up from the bench, but he didn’t rush to Maria’s side. He ambled over and stopped a few feet away.

Maria smiled at him with tears, I presumed, of joy, sliding down her cheeks. When MJ didn’t move, she opened one arm wide, keeping the other firmly around Sofia’s shoulder, and said, “Mijo, I missed you so much.”

“I missed you too, Mama,” he replied, but stood his ground.

That’s when I left the bench and joined them on the patio. “Go hug your mother,” I whispered to MJ. When he didn’t immediately move, I nudged his shoulder. “Now.”

He shuffled to his mother’s side, allowing her to embrace him. She had to stand on her toes to kiss his cheek. Eventually, she stopped fussing over her children and turned her attention to me.

“I’m Grace.” I smiled. “I’m a friend of MJ’s.” That seemed the easiest way to describe our current relationship.

Maria gave me a dubious look and turned to her son.

“She’s teaching me to be a lawyer, Mama.”

“A lawyer?” She said something to him in Spanish, which I didn’t understand.

That’s when the woman in the lab coat, who’d been standing off to the side watching the exchange, offered me her hand. “Cheryl Simpson. I’m a family therapist here at the Center.”

“Grace Keegan Hughes,” I said as I shook her hand.

“Will you be the one bringing the kids to visit?” she asked, clearly confused about my role here.

“No, I just drove them today because their foster parents were busy.”

“Then you’re not their legal guardian?”

“No,” I said without elaboration.

“Okay, well, they’ll be meeting with their mom for about an hour today, depending on how things go. First visits are always a little unpredictable. Were you planning on waiting here or were you going to leave and come back? I can text you when they’re done.”

There was no nearby coffee shop, and by the time I drove home, I’d just have to turn around and drive back, so I told her I’d wait. It was too hot to loiter on the sunny patio, so I decided to take a walk around the grounds.

I’d just settled onto a patch of grass under a large shady tree trying to clear my mind and meditate, when I heard a voice calling my name. I opened my eyes and spied Dr. Stetler heading towards me. If I’d spotted him before he’d spotted me, I would’ve hidden. Too late now. He was wearing the same khakis he’d worn every day I’d been a patient at the Wellstone Center, but in a nod to the weather, he’d paired the pants with a short-sleeve button down instead of his signature flannel shirt.

I’d been sitting cross-legged, but as he approached, I stretched my legs out in front of me, ensuring there would be at least a few feet of distance between us and he’d have to stand in the sun. “How long have you been here?” he asked, shading his eyes from the glare.

I glanced up. “Under this tree? Just a few minutes.”