“Listen,” she says, fierce. “Your dad was doing a bad thing. A horrible thing. But he loved her—not in the way he used to, but he did love her. I believe that. And he was a good man in every other part of his life. Good people make mistakes. Okay? He would never have let her die. You know that. Deep in your heart, Mae, you know he would have done everything to save her.”

No. From now on, I only believe something, or someone, if the fucking math checks out.

And this math—it doesn’t check out.

Add up all the days for that whole year that he was lying to us—about where he was, who he was with, what he was doing. Subtract all the plans we made for the future as a family. Divide that whole family. What do you get? A fraction. Not something whole.

“What do we do about the baby?” I say. Somewhere in LA, Rebecca Chen is carrying a little piece of my family.

Her hands drop. “Oh, sweetie. You don’t have to worry about that.”

I stare at her. “That’s my sister. Or my brother. A person. It’s not their fault. What he did.” Just like it wasn’t my fault that my bio mom didn’t want me. “What do you mean I don’t have to … Of course I have to worry.”

If my bio mom had decided when she got pregnant that she didn’t want me, okay, fine, have an abortion. I am all for choices. I wouldn’t know if I didn’t exist. But she had me. I’m here. And she turned her back on me. It’d be one thing if she’d given me up at birth, made the right choice, but she didn’t. She just abandoned me to foster homes where anything could have—might have—happened to me. And she didn’t even do that from the beginning. Social services came and found all the meth in her house, the baby with the dirty diaper, and they had to take me away. Because she’d literally forgotten about me. When I think about the things people might have done to me, bad things, things I might not remember until I’m forty and suddenly, suddenly I wake up in the middle of the night and—

Aunt Nora blanches. “I didn’t mean—”

“But you did. We’re not expendable,” I say. “Me, that baby. Just because we’re inconvenient. Just because things didn’t work out the way they’re ‘supposed’ to. We exist. Because people chose to bring us into the world. They didn’t have to. But they did. And it’s not our fault. It’s not that baby’s fault that Dad…”

I’m shaking. This anger rolling through me—I’ll never pass my NASA psych evals like this.

“Mae, I’m so sorry. Sweetie—”