Author: Cassia Leo

This time I can’t stop myself from rolling my eyes as I turn around and take a seat next to Adam on the tweed armchairs that look like they’ve been here since the eighties.

Adam grabs my hand and gives it a squeeze. “You’ve waited thirteen years. You can wait a few more minutes.”

“Take your wisdom and get outta here.”

He smiles and kisses my cheek. “Want to hear a joke while you wait?”

Honestly, I’m already nervous as hell. I don’t think a corny joke is going to calm my nerves, but I can’t resist the urge to hear him bomb. I look at him for a moment before I answer because I can’t believe how lucky I am. Some moments are made for showing us who our true friends are, and in this moment I realize Adam is my friend. My true friend. He drove 135 miles to prove that to me today. I don’t feel like I deserve him, but I’ll do my best to keep him. And someday I’ll find a way to repay him.

“Go for it,” I say.

He squints at me because he knows my mind is elsewhere. “Okay. Dirty or corny?”

I glance at the receptionist who appears to be enthralled in whatever she’s looking at on her computer screen, but she’s only eight feet away.

“Better go for corny this time,” I mutter.

“Okay. Knock, knock.”

“Who’s there?”

“Olive.”

“Olive who?”

“Olive You.”

“I think I just threw up some fruit and yogurt in my mouth.” His eyes widen as he pretends to be offended and I smile. “Where are my manners? Come on in. I’ve been waiting for you all my life, Olive You.”

“You’re not just saying that ‘cause I said it, are you?”

“Nope. I mean it. Honestly and truly. Olive You with all my mushy red pimiento heart.”

“Now I just threw up in my mouth.” He grins as leans in to kiss me when I hear someone call my name. I turn and find a thin gentleman, maybe late-forties, with graying brown hair, a gray suit, and a kind face.

“Are you ready, Claire?” he asks, and I nod as I rise from the chair.

Adam stays close behind as I follow Henry down a corridor of cubicles. He turns right at the end of the corridor and heads for an open office door. We enter the office and he waves at a couple of chairs identical to the ones in the lobby. He takes a seat in his leather desk chair and rests his elbows on top of a manila folder in the center of his desk.

“First of all, Claire, I just want to say that I’m very sorry about your mother. She was a friend of mine in high school and I was devastated to hear about her death and even more saddened to know the circumstances.”

He’s probably referring to the fact that I was locked in that trailer with my dead mother for nearly two days. I should be angry that he’s brought this image into my mind, but he does look genuinely saddened.

“Thank you,” I say. “But I’m not here to talk about my mother’s death. I’m here to talk about this trust account. I want to know where the money came from.”

“Of course. Do you mind closing the door?” he asks Adam, who’s closest to the office door.

Adam doesn’t even have to stand from his chair in this tiny office to push the door softly closed.

Henry opens the manila folder and his eyes scan the contents as he flips through the pages. “I have hundreds of deposits here. They’re all electronic funds transfers from a single donor.”

“Not my mother?”

He shakes his head solemnly and I almost want to reach across the desk and strangle him to spit it out.

“Who?” I ask as I lean forward in my chair.

“I’ll need to see some identification first, as we discussed.”

I look over my shoulder at Adam and he pulls out his wallet as I slide my two expired IDs out of my back pocket. I lay them flat on the desk and Adam lays his driver’s license and a credit card next to mine. Henry examines all four IDs for a moment before he slides them back across the desk.

“Well, as I’m sure you’ve guessed, your mother is the grantor for the trust and she requested that you not be granted access until your twenty-first birthday.” He heaves a sigh as he gazes at the folder in front of him. “She wanted you to be provided for.”

The way he says this makes me think my mother knew she wasn’t going to live very long. I’m sure most drug addicts feel this way at some point, but something feels off about this whole situation.

“Are you saying my mom killed herself?”

Henry looks up from the folder looking confused. He thought I already knew this.

“Oh, God,” I whisper as I bury my face in my hands. “I can’t believe this.”

“Your mother loved you, Claire,” Henry insists.

Adam rubs my back as I press the heels of my hands against my eyelids; trying to push back the memory of the hours I spent hiding from my mother’s dead body. I think of how my legs ached as I stood in the crack between the refrigerator and the wall. How I convinced myself more than once that if I came out of my hiding place, this time she would be alive. How I pissed myself because I was too afraid to walk through the living room to go to the restroom. How the policeman who found me cried as he carried me out of the trailer. All this time I thought it was an accident. I thought my mother made a mistake, a miscalculation. Even after everything I went through before that policeman found me and in all the foster homes after that, I never hated my mother. Until now.

I sit up and wipe the tears away from my face. “Who’s the donor?”

The lines at the corners of his eyes deepen as he contemplates the answer to this question. He glances at Adam then back at me. “I think you might want to be alone when you hear this.”

Adam begins to stand and I put my hand on his knee to stop him. “Henry, you just told me my mother committed suicide,” I say incredulously. “Do you really think anything you tell me now is going to be more devastating than that? Who’s the fucking donor?”

Henry looks back and forth nervously between Adam and me as if we’ve just pointed guns at his head and asked him to open the bank vault. “Yes, I do think this news will be quite devastating, but I’ll respect your wishes if you want your friend here with you.” My leg starts bouncing uncontrollably as I wait for Henry’s next words. “Your father is the donor, but—” He puts a hand up to stop me from speaking when I open my mouth. “—before you accuse your mother of keeping you from your father while taking his money, there’s something you need to know.”

The few bites of yogurt I ate three hours ago are swirling in my belly as my stomach twists in knots from the anticipation.

“Claire, your mother was raped when she was seventeen by one of her cousins.”

I knew her uncle repeatedly raped her from age nine to fourteen, but she never told me anything about her cousin.

“Are you sure you don’t mean she was raped by her uncle? Because she told me about that.”

Henry shakes his head. “It was the son of the same uncle. Claire, your mother was a good person. She trusted too many people too much.”

“Until she didn’t trust anybody at all,” I say, beginning to understand why my mother kept me locked away in that trailer and why she was so adamant about teaching me how to stay safe.

Then another realization hits me. We were talking about the donor on the trust account before Henry told me my mother was raped by her cousin.

“Oh, God,” I whisper, and I double over in my chair, suddenly feeling as if a ten-ton slab of concrete is crushing my chest. “He’s my father.”

Adam slides off the chair and kneels in front of me. “I think we should leave.” He lifts my chin and takes my face in his hands. “You don’t need to hear any more of this shit.”

“My mother never told me any of this,” I whisper as he swipes his thumb across my face to brush away the tears. “He raped her and she still took his money.”

I grab Adam’s hands and pull them away from my face, but I hold tight to them as they rest in my lap.

“She did it because she wanted you to be taken care of,” Henry insists.

“Two hundred and seventeen thousand dollars.” Just saying the words aloud makes me feel filthy. “Why would he give her so much money?”

Almost as soon as I speak the words I know the answer. It was hush money to keep her from turning him in. It had to be. She used her pain to extort money from him. She gave up the chance for justice so that I would have a chance at a better life.

“I don’t want that money.”

Adam stares fiercely into my eyes. “You don’t have to take a single penny of it. Let’s get out of here. You don’t need this shit, especially not on your birthday.”

“You know we can’t legally keep this money. The money will just sit here collecting interest,” Henry informs me, as if I care. “She wanted you to have the money.”

Adam stands up and scoots aside so I can stand. Henry looks up at me from his desk with a sad look in his eyes. He’s disappointed that I can’t take the money my mother intended for me. I wonder silently if he ever had a relationship with my mother. How could someone so kind and straight-laced as Henry be so fiercely protective of a heroin addict who committed suicide and extorted money from her rapist?

I know my mother had a hard life. I didn’t know anyone who’d had a more difficult life than her. But that was no excuse for what she did. She left me homeless, drifting from one family to the next, never staying anywhere long enough to form any true friendships. Maybe she thought she was doing me a favor by tearing herself out of my life. Maybe she thought I would end up with a good family right away. She didn’t know it would take eight years for me to arrive on the Knight’s doorstep.

“I just have one more question,” I say as Adam and I reach the office door. “If my mom knew she was going to kill herself, why didn’t she call the police before she did it? Why didn’t she send me to the neighbors or something? Why did she make me stay there with her?”

Henry heaves a deep sigh. “I don’t know.”

“Are you sure you still want to go to dinner? We can stay at the hotel room and talk. Or we can go home. It’s up to you.”

I shake my head and close my eyes as I lean back against the headrest in the truck. “I don’t want to make any more decisions today. You decide.”

“Okay, we’re going home.”

“No! I want to see Senia tonight. Just go to the hotel and we can hang out there until dinner.”

“Anything you want.”

After we check in at the hotel, we go up to our room and curl up on the bed.

“I want to know what it’s like to not feel lost,” I say as I rest my head on Adam’s shoulder and he strokes my hair.

“I don’t know if anybody ever gets there, but we can try.”

“My mom and I used to play this game whenever someone knocked on our front door. She would face the door while I chose one of three hiding places: under the bed, in the closet, or in the nook between the fridge and the wall. As soon as she got rid of whoever was at the door, she’d come looking for me. If I was hiding in the first place she looked, she got to tickle me. I think of stuff like that then I think of the things Henry just told me and I don’t think I ever knew my mother.”

“None of this has to make any sense to you right now.”

“The thing is, it does make sense. She didn’t want to live. I almost don’t blame her for ending her life after everything she went through.” I curl my fingers around a piece of his shirt and squeeze tightly. “The worst part is that I still want her here. Even after everything I’ve learned today. And part of me knows that if I had been braver, if I had called 9-1-1 right away, she might still be here.”