Then the folder closed.
“That concludes the reading.”
I just sat there staring at him.
“That’s all?” I finally asked. “But she promised me—”
The realization hit so hard it physically hurt, low in my chest, the exact spot where old wounds like to settle back in when you least expect them.
Had Mrs. Vance deceived me?
Had Mrs. Vance deceived me?
I left before anyone in that office could see me cry. By the time I made it back to my rental house on Cobb Street, the anger had already curdled into something closer to humiliation. I dropped onto my bed still wearing my work boots and stared at the ceiling while old feelings I thought I’d buried years ago came crawling right back up out of the ground.
The familiar ones.
The foster-home feelings.
You trusted somebody again, and you got burned again.
I grew up bouncing between foster homes across three different counties. My mother left the hospital two days after I was born and never came back for me. My father spent most of my childhood behind bars for a robbery charge nobody in the family ever wanted to discuss in detail.
I learned early how to keep my belongings packed light. How not to get too attached to a bedroom, a school, a family that might change its mind about you by Christmas. How to leave a place quick and quiet the second life shifted underneath me again.
I learned early how to leave a place quick and quiet.
When I aged out of the system at eighteen, I walked out carrying two black trash bags of clothes and absolutely no plan beyond the next bus ticket.
I ended up in Wexford Creek because the rent was cheap and nobody in this town asked too many questions about where a young man had come from or where he was headed next.
I bounced through a string of terrible jobs — stocking shelves, washing dishes, two miserable weeks at a call center — before I landed at Otis’s Diner on Route 9.
Otis hired me during the breakfast rush after another waitress walked out mid-shift without so much as a two-week notice. I’d walked in that morning asking, on a whim, whether they needed any help at all.
“You ever carried three plates at once?” Otis asked, wiping his hands on his apron, sizing me up.
“No, sir.”
“You got ten minutes to learn.”
“You got ten minutes to learn.”
That was Otis. Big as a refrigerator, permanently grumpy-looking in a way that never quite matched how kind he actually was underneath it. He gave me a shot nobody else in that town was willing to give a twenty-year-old with no references and a foster-care history he never once asked me to explain.
Mrs. Odetta Vance came into that diner every Tuesday and Thursday morning, eight o’clock sharp, same booth by the window every single time.
The first morning I served her table, she looked up from the menu and stared at my nametag a long moment.
“Elijah,” she said. “You look tired enough to collapse straight into my waffle.”
