“You think those people will let us see them?” Mariella and Grace now lived with my stepfather’s sister and her husband. Tolliver’s aunt Iona had never intervened to save me and Cameron, or her blood kin Tolliver and Mark. But when the end came, when Human Services discovered after Cameron’s abduction how bad things were in our household and I’d been farmed out to a foster family and Tolliver had gone to his brother, Iona and Hank had swooped down to save poor precious Mariella and baby Grace, in a hail of publicity and denials of all knowledge of how low my mother had sunk.

After living with Iona and Hank two months, our little sisters had gone from regarding us as their saviors and defenders to reacting as if we had visible plague sores.

Out of many painful memories of that short era, the picture of Grace screaming, “I don’t want to see you ever again!” when I’d gone to pick her up was the most shattering.

“It couldn’t be them,” I said for maybe the hundredth time to Tolliver, as we sat surrounded by the smell of cooking oil and lots of primary colors. “They loved us.” He nodded, as he had every other time.

“Iona and Hank have convinced them we had something to do with how that household was run,” he said.

“Or not run. How it was bungled,” I said, out of the deep well of bitterness that separated me from other people.

“She’s dead now,” he said, very quietly. “He might as well be.”

“I know, I know. I’m sorry.” I waved a hand in front of my face, to dispel the recurrence of anger. “I just can’t help but hope that someday the little girls will be grown up enough to understand.”

“It won’t ever be the same.” Tolliver was my oracle, and he knew. He almost always said the things I was scared to even think. He was right.

“I guess not. But someday they’ll need a sister and a brother, and they’ll call us.”

He bent back to his food. “Some days, I hope not,” he said very quietly, and I couldn’t think of anything to say.

I knew what he meant. We had no one to answer to. We had no one to take care of. We only had each other. After years of desperately plastering the cracks in our family so no one could see in, just watching out for each other in the here and now seemed relatively simple and even soothing.

Hollis sat down at our table, his meal in a bag in his hand. “I hope I’m not interrupting anything,” he said. “I was going through the drive-through and I saw you two in here. You looked mighty serious.”