“I can follow up with the mothers from the playgroup and DFPS, and I got a few known associates from Dave. I have your list of PO box addresses, so I know where she lived before. Dave gave me the tag number, and I can trace her that way, maybe. Anything you can think of that would put me in a direction?”
But there wasn’t. Not after fifteen-plus years of secondhand stories and silence.
“Birdwine,” I said, and stopped. I had two words stuck in my throat, pounding with the rhythm of my heart: find her, find her, find her.
“I got this,” he said, soft, calm, deadly serious.
It was as if he could feel my heart’s urgent drumbeat through the wires, as if it were driving him as hard as it drove me. He was all in on this search, as invested as if it were personal. Perhaps he had some motivation of his own, but I was too abjectly grateful to question it. I simply took it, and then braced my body for the bad part that came next: the wait.
I sucked at waiting, but I had no other options. Hana had disappeared deep into Kai’s world. I’d grown up there. Names, relationships, and identities were fluid. Adherence to the law was optional. There were no safety nets. There had been nothing to catch me when Kai went to prison. She had vanished, ill and drugged, and Hana could have landed anywhere in the whole country. Kai was almost definitely dead by now. Anyone, anything might have Hana.
The buzzer sounded, and the sound almost shuddered me right out of my skin. Julian was half an hour late. I punched the code to let him into the building, then started pacing back and forth, kitchen to front door and back. My heels banged the floor in a nervous tempo that had Henry sticking a disgruntled face over the sofa, wondering why I was vibrating the floors. The angle of his ears changed to alarmed as I stomped past again, and he ghosted back to the laundry room. He had a hiding spot behind the dryer.
Julian was taking so long to reach my floor, I wondered if he was using the stairs. I paced another circuit. Maybe he’d died on the journey through the stairwell, and I’d never see him again. That was the current theme in our shared gene pool. I walked to the front door and jerked it open.
There he stood. He was taller than me, but my heels were high enough to put us even. His eyes widened, and he startled like a deer. His hands flew up. If he’d been psyching himself up to knock, he hadn’t made it quite yet.
“Hi,” he said.
“Hi,” I said back. “Did you want to come in? Or knock? Or . . . ?” I meant it to be funny, but nervous on me often read belligerent.
“Yeah,” he said, but he made no move to step across my threshold. He swallowed audibly and scrubbed at the side of his face with one hand, like Birdwine fighting off a binge. “I need to say something first. I’ve been standing on your mat trying to decide how to apologize for the way things went when we first met. I should have realized you were my sister earlier.” The words kept coming in a tumble, as if he were a year-one kid in law school, botching his first overpracticed opening argument in front of a mock jury. “But I thought—I mean, I assumed—but not because I’m—”
“I have no idea what you’re saying.”
“All the way here I practiced, and then I sat down in my car, sweating and practicing, but I’m blowing it, huh?” He took a second, gathering himself, and then he looked me in the eye. “I’m trying to tell you, straight up, I’m not a racist.”
It caught me off guard. I’d forgotten that awkward moment; he’d assumed his sister would be white because he was. He’d apparently been dwelling on it, building it up in his head, and now he was being so relentlessly earnest it was both sweet and unsettling.
I said, “Glad to hear it,” to close the topic.
He must have taken it as sarcasm, though, because his skin washed pink.
“No, but I’m really not. It doesn’t matter to me that you’re—” He didn’t know quite what I was, and he floundered. To be fair, no one ever did. He finally ended with “—whatever you are.” I felt some hugely inappropriate laughter bubbling up and squelched it. I wasn’t sure what my face was doing, but it couldn’t have been good, because he babbled on. “I didn’t have that kind of mom and dad. Not at all.” His voice rose in pitch and volume as the words rushed unstoppably out. “I can see why you’d think that, because I went to Berry College, which is WASPy, I know, but my girlfriend there was black, and it wasn’t—”
“My last girlfriend was black, too,” I put in, to stop him talking. It worked. He froze.
“Oh, I’m sorry. I thought . . .” He trailed off and gulped and said, “I didn’t realize you were gay.”
“I’m not,” I said, and then I was laughing. I couldn’t help it. “I’m screwing with you.”
His eyes got even wider, and he sputtered, “Well, I’m not homophobic!” He looked ready to burst into tears on my welcome mat, and what was wrong with me?
“I’m sorry, it’s not funny,” I said, though I was still grinning. “It’s just—look at my suit.”