“No one is going to steal your future, Lee.”

As I turn the knob to open my front door, I can’t help but feel a renewed hope that she’s right.

My little blue house is hushed as I rummage through the freezer. I find a frost-coated Lean Cuisine and put it in the microwave and watch the carousel turn under the dim light. I look around as my sad, and very late, dinner spins in the window.

Everything around me is a reminder of where I come from and who I am. My grandmother’s blue-and-white Delft plates hang on the wall above my flea-market-find dining table. She hung them on her wall in her big old house in Tacoma. My mother’s mother was the kind of woman who made everything untouchable, saving cherished items solely for a special occasion. The silver in the top drawer of the hutch was never used but never tarnished, either. Those blue plates were to be seen, admired, talked about. Never used on a dining table. My mom was the opposite. She said that nice things were meant to be enjoyed and that her mom was more of a hoarder than a giver. I wonder where I fall in that spectrum.

I live by myself. I own a cat, for God’s sake. I know that I’ve built a wall around myself. A good one too. I know that I’ve hoarded my life. Sometimes I think I have good reason to, but most of the time I realize that what I do today is part of the chain reaction, the legacy, of what happened to me when I was twelve.

When Adam Warner found me.

I saw the car the day before. It was a sedan, blue in color. Even though I know cars because my brother knew them, I cannot make out what the make and model were in my memory. Charlene and I passed the car on Tamarack Lane on the way to school. Charlene and her family lived two doors down, and while we weren’t best friends, we were good walking-to-school partners. She talked a mile a minute, which was fine. I was pretty much a listener back then. I could easily pick out the bits of truth from her exaggerated tales—something that would serve me well in the job that would become my life. The morning before it happened, Charlene was talking about some uncle of hers who lived in Latvia or someplace like that and how she’d been invited to stay in his castle the next time she made it over there.

“I didn’t know you’ve been to Europe,” I said.

“Haven’t you?” she asked, avoiding my question in the way that she always did.

“No,” I said. “We saw the redwoods in California last summer. That’s about as far as we’ve gone.”

“That’s pretty cool,” she said, adjusting her dark brown braids and hiking up her backpack. “Did I tell you that my dad’s brother sailed from San Francisco to Hawaii in a boat he made of redwood?”