Sofia shrugs. “We need food, don’t we? Don’t get to be picky about the methods when you’re hungry.”

Yeah, we need food. No one comes for us, and it means we have no food deliveries either. We have bags of rice and beans to keep us going for a few weeks at best. Potatoes. Peanut butter. Vegetable stock powder and instant coffee. Ramen from the guard station, some chocolates from the therapist’s office, and a tin of glazed pecans from the warden’s desk. But we’re rapidly running out of meat and vegetable supplies. I didn’t think all of us together would eat this much.

I don’t want to gamble on a few weeks.

We might all be dead in a few weeks.

If we aren’t, I don’t want to try to live through the winter cold with beets and persimmons and what little else Khalil and Riley manage to grow. I can see a future past that—with a spring garden and vegetables in summer, but between now and then extends a deep, hungry chasm. We don’t have enough to stock up, so we need to be able to feed ourselves.

So I snuck out last night and set traps in the woods around Hope. Or at least, I tried.

“Are you sure it’ll work?” Sofia asks. She brandishes her own knife. We both need something to use if I caught an animal and it isn’t dead yet.

“No.”

It’s been years since I lived with the Podolskys. They were my first foster family when I entered the system. To my three-year-old brain, they were already ancient when I got there, and I had to leave the week before my tenth birthday, because Baba Podolsky broke her hip, and they couldn’t take care of me any longer. But it was a good place to be. It’s the only place I remember fondly. The place whose phone number I whispered to myself over and over again.

Mr. Podolsky taught me to build snare traps to catch the rats and vermin that ran around their basement and backyard. He taught me to forage wild garlic and mushrooms. He showed me the constellations.

Baba Podolsky told me about Paris and how she traveled there when she was in her twenties, to find a handsome gentleman to fall in love with. Apparently, that was what my birth mother had done too. Or at least, I still had the photo of the man I’d been told was my father—broad-shouldered with mousy hair like mine and glasses perched on the tip of his nose. He laughed at something only he could see, ruining his posing in front of the Eiffel Tower.

I kept the picture safe all through staying with my first three foster families. At least one of those families told me college wasn’t for people like me, but the closer I came to high school, the more I entertained the idea of studying abroad and trying to find him. I only remembered my mother vaguely—and not fondly—but he became a larger-than-life figure to me. Someone who would see me and accept me.