“Jesus. “

“It gets worse.” I waited a beat for that to register with Kane and continued. “Mom, always willing to follow in my father’s footsteps, remarried a man when I was fifteen. My grandparents, her parents, despised him. Said he was only after their money and if she married him, she would never see a cent. She apparently, and from what I heard from her, figured they were bluffing. She moved in with him and his two kids from a previous marriage, and she decided she was going to start a whole new family too. I haven’t talked to her since I was twenty. She calls maybe once a year to see how I’m doing, but at this point, they’re both strangers.”

I didn’t often speak of my family, why would I want to? What woman wanted to admit that she was so unlovable, both of her parents abandoned her for newer and better families. Better children.

A familiar lump lodged in my throat and I cleared it. I glanced out Kane’s living room windows for a moment to clear my head except my thoughts were too loud. Too vibrant.

“Probably shouldn’t be all that surprising,” I said more to myself than him. “That I ended up finding a guy exactly like my dad.”

Kane called my name on a whisper, but I shook my head. I didn’t need to see pity and sadness in his eyes. They’d looked too much like Heather’s the first time I told her, when she asked why I never went home for holiday breaks. I had to look my best friend in the eye, who came from such a perfect, loving, accepting, and beautiful family, and tell her where would I go? I have no home.

“I need a minute.”

Kane called my name again, but I was already around the corner of the hall and up the stairs to my room. There, I went straight to the bathroom and flipped on the water faucet handles. Splashing my face with cold water didn’t help soothe or minimize the rush of emotion rushing to the surface.

What horrible, selfish people would so easily abandon their daughter? And it wasn’t like we came from some kind of stereotypical family you’d think of when you heard a story like that. My parents weren’t alcoholics or drug addicts. They didn’t gamble away their savings or live in some rundown, falling apart shack in the middle of nowhere. My mom was the daughter of some of the most famous music production company owners. She’d had everything she always wanted. Grew up with extreme privilege. My dad had always had to work for everything he wanted until they got married, but even then, he worked in pharmaceutical sales until he was vice president of the company.

And yet somehow, all of that meant nothing when it came to their ability to love me. Tears mixed with water and I kept rinsing and scrubbing my face to wash it all away.