She sat, and the chair’s plastic creaked slightly underneath her. The back unyielded, and Dani’s skin molded around the seat’s back. She folded her arms, unfolded them, and finally just laid them on her lap as she tucked her legs underneath.

Sandra chuckled. “They’re damn uncomfortable, ain’t they?”

Dani smiled abruptly. There was the Sandra she remembered from her last visit.

“Something like that.”

“You come for your second visit today. I suppose you want what I promised you.”

“If you’re up for it.”

“What do you care?” Her question came out like a bark.

“I care.” And Dani realized that she did care. Very much.

“I don’t even care. How am I supposed to believe that you care?”

“I’ve learned recently that there are people out there who do care. And I think I’m a little like you, but I’ve learned not to look a gift horse in the mouth.”

Her grandmother studied her intently for a moment before she sighed and lay back down on her bed.

“Have you always been like this?”

No answer.

“Is this why my aunts don’t talk to you?”

There wasn’t an answer. Dani waited, suddenly filled with an uncanny calmness. Strength filled her. She didn’t know where it came from, but it was there. She felt similar strength as she held one of the children in her arms. It came from nowhere, at a time when she should’ve broken. She learned that day she could feel strength and weakness at the same time. She could feel surety and terror at the same time, too.

She waited, like she had during the storm.

Finally, Sandra O’Hara broke the silence. “My daughters don’t talk to me because they don’t know I’m here. I only told one person I was here.”

Dani bit back the inevitable question.

Sandra answered it anyway, “Their father. No one else knew I was here. With him gone, I’m in the system. The government pays my bills.”

“That doesn’t make sense.” Dani shook her head. “How’d my mother know you were here?”

“Because she was told by someone else. I got a guess who that was, but it ain’t for you to know.”

Dani leaned forward. “I think it is my business. I don’t think it’s right to have secrets in families.”

Her grandmother snorted, sounding so much like Mae that Dani felt a pang in her chest. “Yeah, well, we got so many generational secrets, I don’t feel it pertains to us. We don’t pretend to be a family anymore. We got broke long ago.”

“Who’s my grandfather?” Dani had asked a different question on her last visit. She had asked for her father, but now she wanted to know who lay at the start of the roots. She wanted to understand how the branches had grown as they did.

“Your grandfather ain’t around anymore. He’s long gone.”

“Did you love him?”

Sandra’s movements stilled in the bed. As quiet as she grew, Dani would’ve easily believed death just took her grandmother’s breath. And so her answer was even more eerie when she replied, “That was the problem. I did love him.”

Dani frowned.

Her grandmother mused further, “The two of us together broke a lot of folks. We weren’t supposed to love each other, but we did. I loved him and he loved me, and it wasn’t right. We were supposed to stop, but we never did. I got pregnant three times from him. That’s another secret.” Sandra laughed a bitter laugh. “Everyone thinks my babies were born of different daddies, but they weren’t. Whole-blooded sisters, they were. Same thing with your mother. She had the same sickness as me. All of you had the same daddy. I’ll tell you that bit.”

“You’re not going to tell me who my father is, are you?”

Her grandmother didn’t respond, and Dani knew she wouldn’t.

She saw the emptiness in her grandmother’s eyes. She knew some of it was inside her, too. “What happened to you?” Dani asked, but she didn’t expect a response. Hell, Dani wasn’t sure to whom the question was directed. Herself or her grandmother. “What happened to us? All of us? What happened to my mother?”

“We fall in love with the wrong men.”

“What if we don’t fall in love?”

“Then we don’t live.”

“Are you alive?” The question was an afterthought.

The answer was whispered in return. “No.” Sandra continued, speaking to the air, “Sometimes I don’t know where I am. Sometimes I don’t know what time it is. I don’t know what’s real or what’s from my head. When I met him, he made me feel alive. I got an anchor to the world, like I belonged somewhere when he held me, even though we both knew it wasn’t right. I could’ve stopped it, but he could’ve too. Neither of us stopped because I needed that feeling. It’s why I’m in here. He left me and my sadness came back. I stopped living the day he went away.”

Dani heard a hallowed wistfulness in her grandmother’s voice. She didn’t dare move. She didn’t dare interrupt whatever else she was going to hear.

“You don’t got the same sickness as me, Daniella.” Dani knew her grandmother wasn’t whispering to her. “You ain’t sick in the head. You just sick in the heart. But you got a wall inside of you. I made sure to install that. I made damn sure. You need a wall or people gonna take you for a ride. They tried with me. Hell, most think your daddy did take me for a ride, but I went with him. I’d go again if the chance arose.”