The first few weeks Ash slept on the floor. One morning Becca found her there. She shook Ash awake, and sank down onto the floor beside her, Freud joining them. “Sweet girl, what in the world are you doing down here?”

Ash’s face flushed as she thought about all the excuses she could give. She opted for the truth. “It’s so nice here, but I don’t want to get used to all of this in case you change your mind and send me away.” She could still remember Becca’s shocked expression. “This bed is yours. This home is yours. You’re not going anywhere.”

Sometimes though, Ash wanted to go back to when she didn’t care about Becca. She’d gotten good at not caring. Her birth mother taught her that. Faye wasn’t much of a talker, but her hands were quite expressive. The palm strike across the face when Ash was four. The quick jab to the ribs when she was five. By the time Ash turned six, she learned to manage the pain, but the betrayal never got easier. How could her mother, the woman she loved most in the world, want to see her suffer?

Ash gave up on answering that question. She was thirteen the last time it happened. Faye lunged at her, hatred burning in her eyes. Ash finally had enough. She smashed the woman in the head with her algebra textbook and grabbed the three hundred bucks she saved from under her mattress. Two hours later Ash was on a Greyhound bus, bound for LA.

Growing up in a shitty trailer park on the outskirts of Macon, Georgia, Ash spent years daydreaming about where she’d go if she had the courage to run away. TV always made it seem like breaking into show business was easy. Ash figured why not. She thought once she arrived in LA, some hotshot agent would make her famous. Or maybe she’d get on one of those reality shows. She had a decent voice, better than most of the singers she saw. She envisioned shopping on Rodeo Drive and lounging at the Beverly Hills Hotel while waiters attended to her every need.

The second Ash stepped off the bus, she was confronted with a much different reality. The ugliness wasn’t just lurking beneath the glittering lights, it was front and center. The city streets were covered with discarded beer bottles, fast-food wrappers, and used condoms. The Hollywood Walk of Fame was teeming with emotionally unstable vagrants jostling for space alongside desperate wannabe actors in superhero costumes, all of them trying to make a quick buck from the horde of selfie-obsessed tourists.

Ash worked hard to keep a low profile, steering clear of the cops. She’d heard plenty of stories about how shitty foster care was. She’d already survived a hellish existence with Faye. No way was she going back to another. Which was how Ash ended up living on the streets.

Her first year had been a special kind of hell. Ash had created a system: sleep during day, keep it moving at night, and always be on the lookout for potential threats. She had done her best to stay clean, washing up in park bathrooms and in shelters. People were always eager to offer a few dollars to a cute kid, and she had learned to pick pockets so she hadn’t starved. She’d done her best to avoid the pervs, and had learned to fight back when she had to. A chance encounter with Becca had changed everything. Together they’d built a home. The last thing Ash wanted was to ruin it. It was selfish though, because she didn’t want to lose Nate either. She wanted them both.