“Not going anywhere,” Claire whispered back.
Her voice was as soft as a prayer.
JOAQUIN
The first time Joaquin had met with his therapist after moving in with Mark and Linda, it hadn’t gone well.
They had met in an office that was in a high-rise building, so high that Joaquin could see all the way to the ocean. That alone had made him a little woozy, but the office itself was clean and white and modern. The only color in the room had been a purple orchid (in a white pot, of course) on his therapist’s, Ana’s, desk, and all that glaring white had reminded Joaquin too much of thin white sheets on a bare cot, of restraints and chafing on his wrists, of that drugged-up sleepiness that had made him feel like he wasn’t really sleeping at all. It was so quiet in the office that he could hear the whoosh of the air-conditioning when it came on.
Joaquin made it all of two minutes in there before walking out, the sweat beading at his hairline, his hands shaking.
“I’m not going back in there,” he told Linda and Mark at the time, which was the first time he had actively told them something that they didn’t want to hear. He had tried so hard to make them happy, to make them want him, but he couldn’t set foot back in that room.
They had sat with him on the curb while he got his breath back, Mark’s hand resting carefully on his shoulder as his heart slowly returned to a normal pace. They had sat with him for the better part of twenty minutes, waiting silently for him to explain, and when Joaquin didn’t—couldn’t—explain, they started asking questions. Sometimes he liked when they asked him questions, sometimes he didn’t. Sometimes it felt like they cared too much; other times, it felt like they wanted to know too much.
“Too much like the hospital,” Joaquin finally managed to say. He hadn’t minded the questions that time.
“Ah,” Linda said.
“Got it,” Mark agreed.
The next week, he and Ana met in a diner closer to Mark and Linda’s house. (Joaquin still hadn’t and still didn’t think of it as “my house” or even “our house,” just “their house.” It was okay, though, because it was still a nice house. It didn’t have to be his for him to like living there.) “Is this spot okay?” Ana had said, sliding into the booth across from him. “I heard my office is a little too antiseptic-looking.”
“It’s fine,” Joaquin said.
“You do know that the word fine is basically kryptonite to a therapist’s ears, right?” Ana said, then signaled the waiter for a lemonade. “Fucked up, insecure, neurotic, emotional,” she recited, ticking the emotions off on her fingers. “Therapy 101.”
Joaquin knew all that, of course. One of his older foster brothers had actually gotten a tattoo that said “I’m Fine” across his shoulder blades. Joaquin knew all the tricky ways the phrase worked. “Well, it’s accurate,” he told Ana, who smiled.
Joaquin hadn’t wanted to see her, even if she was nice and didn’t tell Linda when he drank three Cokes in a row. (Refills were free.) But then he had figured out that Mark and Linda were paying for Ana out of their own pockets, and Joaquin guessed that he owed it to them to at least go. Foster parents weren’t always crazy about spending their own money on things. Joaquin didn’t want to push his luck.
Eighteen months later, Ana and Joaquin were still meeting in the diner every Friday after school. They always got the same thing—Cobb salad and lemonade for Ana; veggie burger, fries, and a Coke for Joaquin—and sat in the same booth at the back of the restaurant, where the acoustics made the restaurant sound way busier than it actually was.
“So,” Ana said as she slipped into the booth across from him the Friday after he first met Maya and Grace. “How did it go?”
It had taken Joaquin a while to appreciate Ana’s no-bullshit approach to therapy. She also dropped a lot of f-bombs, which he liked. Most therapists treated him like he was his own bomb, about to explode, which, to be fair, was how he had felt for most of his life.
But still.
“It was fine,” Joaquin said, then grinned when she glared at him. “Just kidding. It was nice.” If fine was Ana’s gold-medal word, then nice definitely took the silver.
“They’re white,” Joaquin added, tearing the paper off his straw as the waitress brought their drinks. She knew their orders by heart now; Ana and Joaquin hadn’t seen a menu in three months.
“You thought that might be the case,” Ana said. “What about them? Were they nice?”
Joaquin smiled to himself. “They’re funny. They get along really well already. And that made me feel,” he said, beating Ana to the question, “fine. I’m glad they like each other.”
“And did they like you?”
Joaquin shrugged and took a sip of his Coke. “Guess so. We have a group text now. We’re meeting on Sunday again.”
“That’s good,” Ana said. Good, nice, fine. Ana was trying to pave a very rocky road, Joaquin could tell.
“It’s just—” he started to say, then reached for his Coke.
Ana raised an eyebrow. “It’s just . . . ?” she prodded.
Joaquin ran his thumb down the glass, leaving a dry stripe down the center of condensation. “They were both adopted, you know? Their parents paid a lot of money to get them.”
Ana nodded. “Probably so, yes.”
When Joaquin didn’t respond, she added, “Does that bother you?”
“It doesn’t bother me for them,” he said, then made another stripe on the glass. “It’s just . . . people got paid to keep me, and that still wasn’t enough.”
Ana looked at him across the table. “How does that make you feel?”
Joaquin shrugged. He didn’t want to talk about his sisters anymore. He was still finding the words to describe how he felt about them, and he knew that Ana would wait for him to discover the right ones.
“I broke up with Birdie,” he said instead. He hadn’t brought it up at their last meeting because of the Maya and Grace decision. And also because he hadn’t wanted to talk about Birdie. Discovering two new sisters had been really helpful when it came to avoiding difficult subjects.
Ana blinked at him. It took a lot to surprise her. Joaquin had seen her composed face many times over the past year and a half; surprising her felt like a weird sort of victory, a Pyrrhic one. “Wow,” she said after almost a full ten seconds, during nine of which Joaquin questioned his decision to bring Birdie up at all.
“Want to tell me why?” The surprise was gone and Ana’s face had smoothed back into its normal therapist mode. “I thought you really liked her.”
“I do,” Joaquin said. “That’s why I broke up with her.”
Ana cocked her head at him. “You know, that sounds like something the Joaquin I met eighteen months ago would have said.”