“We need help.”
“Money?”
“A place to stay,” she said quickly. “Just for a while.”
I almost laughed.
Not because it was funny.
Because my body did not know what else to do with the absurdity of it.
“You want to stay here?”
“You have that whole attic,” my mother said. “Don’t act like you’re sleeping under a bridge.”
That was when I felt something inside me go quiet.
Not calm.
Quiet.
A very old kind of tired.
“You mean Mr. Gideon’s attic,” I said.
My mother waved a hand. “He’s one man in a big house. Surely he can spare a room for three little children.”
There it was.
The sentence she had carried all the way across town like a weapon.
Three little children.
Not Elowen’s choices.
Not Sylas’s temper.
Not Maura’s emptied accounts.
Just three little children placed between me and the word no.
