Part of me wanted to take the folder right now, walk out, hand the whole damn thing over to a fresh PI. One I’d never met before. Preferably female.
Even so, I couldn’t let Julian’s starry-eyed statement stand. I spoke as kindly as I could. “You think Birdwine’s not our kind. I get it. But, Julian, there is no our kind for you and me. Sure, as it turns out, Birdwine is an asshole. But that is my kind. This girl we’re looking for? She’s going to be my kind, too. You think this”—I waved my hand around, encompassing the wrecked house, the sketchy neighborhood, the feeling of unfriendly eyes on us outside—“would offend her tender sensibilities? Baby, you grew up with Little League and meals made off the food pyramid, but Hana comes from here, where people ditch other people, or use them, or eat them whole.”
Julian got redder and redder as I talked, and so I shut up before he lost his temper.
“I know,” he said, and he didn’t sound angry at all. “But isn’t that the point of a rescue? You take somebody out of where it’s bad. You bring them someplace better. Not perfect. No place is perfect. You bring them to the best place that you can.”
I blinked, knocked off my high horse. Damn, but the truth had such a ring to it.
Julian was right, again. I should take it as given that he had a better handle on the personal than I did. I couldn’t resurrect my mother, make her marry Hana’s mystery father the day before she was conceived, set them up in a cottage by a balmy sea. But we could find her. We could make sure she was safe and fed and cared for, because it was the least that she deserved. It was the least that any kid deserved.
“All right. I hear you, but you need to hear me, too. Any plan we make assumes too much. You’re assuming we will find her. We’re assuming Kai is dead, and Hana isn’t. Also, she’s ten. She may already be embarked on some mad self-rescue of her own, bonding with someone, making herself a place. We can’t plan a damn thing from a base of total ignorance.” My words rang true enough to match his.
“Okay. That means we have to focus on what we do have.” I nodded, thinking he meant the file, just as he added. “You and me. I think we’re starting to really be a team.” I stopped mid-nod, but he was already beaming at me, glowing like a piece of Muppet-headed living sunshine. This kid! He was so inclined toward nesting—and so sweet in the core of him. I couldn’t help but smile back, pleased he understood that I’d been genuinely trying.
I broke eye contact before it turned into a love-in, though, flipping through more pages of interview notes. I skimmed, hoping something would leap out at me that could put us back on Hana’s trail. Near the bottom of the stack, I found the map.
Time stopped.
“What?” Julian said. I couldn’t answer. I was breathing so hard it was like I had been sprinting. I rummaged through my bag to pull my envelope out again, reread Kai’s final note.
I am going on a journey, Kali. I am going back to my beginning.
Tenderhearted Julian instantly came back to stand beside me, one hand on my shoulder, asking me, “Are you okay?”
I wasn’t. Birdwine had drawn their route in highlighters, a bright orange line of color squiggling through the South. I ran my finger along the line, tracing Kai’s trajectory. Was every mystic-ass, pretentious line of Kai’s note literal? When had Kai ever been literal?
“Look,” I said, though it was meaningless to Julian.
“At the map? Why? Do you know where Hana is?” he asked, now with an urgency that matched mine.
I looked up and into those eyes he had, my mother’s own.
“She’s in my life,” I told him. “Hana’s somewhere in the middle of my life.”
CHAPTER 9
It’s better this way, I think, as the door shuts behind Joya. I’m not crying. What I feel is so far past crying that I can’t move, or it will get out of me and be a sound, and I don’t know what that sound is. I lie on the bed unmoving, but inside my skin, every atom is seething with a single thought: I want my mother. I want my mother blindly, like a newborn mouse. Inside the quiet shell of me, I churn and shudder. My body so badly wants to root and seek, attach, be warm and full.
I hear Mrs. Mack and Shar, Karice, and Kim talking and banging the door as they get back from dinner. I don’t hear Candace, but that’s normal. She’ll be mincing along behind them, quiet. If she comes in this room right now, if she so much as looks at me with her wet eyes, I am not responsible for what I do to her.