But the need to find Hana had hit me like biology. It was that basic, and that unreasonable. I wanted to find her in the same way that a starving person wants a sandwich, or a person underwater swims straight upward toward the air. All I had to do was think her name, and the world reversed. I’d know what it meant to be the lost girl, swamped in a wash of feeling much too strong to be mere memory. My heart would race, beating out the call to find her, find her, find her.
It was hard to see past it, because urges to breathe or eat or nurse the crying baby yell too loud for logic. They come from deep down in the most primitive portions of the brain. Julian had jerked me right into reality simply by asking the question. When Hana was found, what the hell was I going to do with her?
Raising kids was not remotely in my wheelhouse. Hell, I didn’t even have a place to put her; I lived in a radically open space specifically designed for single residents. The lack of walls declared I was a loner louder than a thousand closed doors could. I had no room in my life, literally, no den or extra bedroom, that would allow for any kind of family.
Julian was still reading, drinking in every word. This was the same kid who had wandered the city with all his most important papers stuffed in a file. He had thrown them on my floor and then galloped off in a panic. Well, he was impetuous and emotional, but he’d been Raised Right, in the southern sense. He knew to put his napkin in his lap, to open doors for little old ladies, and to read contracts before he signed.
“It’s an intern form,” I said. “I need you to sign it mostly so privilege applies here.”
“Yeah. And this is a really good idea,” Julian said without looking up. “Today feels like good practice.”
“Practice? For what?”
“Like, so we can learn to work together,” Julian said. I opened my mouth to tell him this was only for today, but he was still talking. “We’ll have to, when we find Hana.”
I tried to make a noncommittal noise, but it came out like a hum in the midst of being strangled. He’d reset the angles, again.
He’d said we, as if he already had a place inside my nonexistent plans. As if he had the right to shape them. But he wasn’t in my tribe, much less in Hana’s.
This kid had grown up in suburbia, with a mommy and a daddy and a bike and probably a dog named Duke or Fido. He had three-quarters of a Berry College education and no frame of reference to imagine the world that Hana and I came from. He’d never set a toe into the places Birdwine would be looking for her. All we had in common were my mother’s genes, diffused by different men and scattered into each of us. He was demanding a piece of a kind of pie he’d never smelled or tasted.
He handed me the signed form. “Ready,” he said. He sounded downright perky.
I couldn’t think about this now. He was right. I had a job to do that was the very opposite of the lunacy he was proposing. I vivisected families; this orphan was asking how we could create the very thing that my life’s work was deconstructing. I shook my head at him and got out of the car, walking toward the job I understood.
He got out, too, following me to the wraparound porch. I forced myself to put aside his assumptions and focus. I rang the bell, smiling for the camera. I didn’t spot its small glass eye gleaming at me, but security cameras were what rich people had in lieu of peepholes. I could feel it, that faint electric charge that crept across my skin when I was being watched.
Oakleigh jerked open the door almost immediately, scowling. Her glance took in Julian, his legal pad and pen held at the ready, and dismissed him as something secretarial. She skipped hellos and introductions and went straight to bitching, even as the door swung wide.
“I don’t see why I have to talk to the cops. Clark’s the one who broke in here and started this. Can we make a counter-thingy, and get him arrested? He’s trespassing, moving and ruining my things—every day.” The lather of fear I’d heard in her voice on the phone was gone, transmuted into anger. Julian leaned back from the blast, eyes wide. She turned and stomped away, and we followed her into the vaulted foyer. “I changed the security code. Twice. What am I supposed to do now?”
“Change clothes,” I suggested. Her dress was red, and tight, and very short, worn with black boots that came up past her knees. There was a lot of slim, tan thigh showing between her hem and the boot tops, and as we followed her in, I caught Julian looking. He blushed bright pink and looked deliberately away. To be fair, I didn’t know many straight men who could have kept their eyes trained purely up toward heaven.
“I already changed. When I called you, I was in yoga pants,” she said, waving us forward. There was a sweeping staircase, and beyond that, a wide arch opened up into a great room. She angled to the stairs, climbed three steps, then paused and turned toward us. Almost posing. “Cops love this dress. Last month, it got me out of a ticket.”
“Mm-hm,” I said, hoping to all the gods we wouldn’t get a female cop.
Then she turned to the wall and jabbed her finger at a patch of nothing. “Look at this!”