Green like the last stubborn leaves clinging to autumn branches, filled with something I couldn’t place.

Not at the time.

Later, I would understand it was emptiness.

“I have to go,” I told Tiffany, cutting her off mid-sentence.

“But we have to talk about Cal⁠—”

I hung up and stared as my father kept the door open long enough for the boy to hesitate, to glance up at the threshold as if it were an invisible wall he wasn’t sure he was allowed to cross.

“Jenna!” he called out, his voice carrying through the house.

I blinked, confused. Where was the familiar routine of my dad coming home after a long day?

Mom came rushing from the kitchen, drying her hands on a dish towel. She saw Dad, then the boy, and her face softened, though her eyes flickered with quiet questions.

The boy flinched when my father placed a hand on his shoulder, and I watched as Dad’s eyes misted over.

I had never seen him cry. Not once. Not when he was tired, not when he was angry, not even when his own father was taken from him in the line of duty. But in that moment, he did.

A single tear escaped, trailing down his cheek before he quickly wiped it away. “I want you to meet Blake,” he said, his voice cracking as if the words had splintered on their way out.

Blake.

The name meant nothing to me then, but it would come to mean everything.

* * *

Blake McHayes had been a foster child since he was six years old, when his father took a kitchen knife and erased his mother and younger sister from existence during a rage-filled night that left Los Angeles shaken.

It was a story so gruesome and unfathomable that it haunted even the most seasoned police officers.

He was found beneath his mother’s body, drenched in both her blood and his own, barely clinging to life. The doctors called it a miracle. The town called it a tragedy. He survived when he shouldn’t have, lived while the rest of his family didn’t. For weeks, people spoke about it. They mourned, pitied, and whispered how awful, how sad. But as quickly as the story spread, it was forgotten; the world moved on without a second glance.

Blake was left behind, at the mercy of people who failed him. He became another child shuffled through the foster care system, passed from house to house, never staying long.

They labeled him a problem. A difficult child. No one saw how badly he was suffering, except for my father, who found him alone in a basement, starving and broken. His foster home had been a drug den, a place no child should ever be forced to endure. And yet, he had. Neglected. Beaten. Forgotten.