The Summer Children (The Collector #3)(73)

It was too much. It was all just too much.

All those years of beatings and Daddy coming to her room at night, camera at the ready.

Mama escaping without her.

Those years of the basement and Daddy’s friends.

The hospital and the trial and all the foster homes, the parade of horrors too infrequently interrupted by goodness or indifference.

And now her father was going to get out of prison. He was going to have another baby girl. Another daughter that he’d . . .

He’d . . .

But she worked through the fear and sorrow and rage as best she could. It was absurd. If—and it was a massive if—her father was released early, there wasn’t a chance in hell he’d be allowed near his daughter. No man with her daddy’s history would be allowed near a little girl.

Right?

She returned to work, still shaky but better. A little better. Getting there, maybe. She reminded herself of the good she did. She was helping children, more important now than ever.

But this little boy . . .

Here was this file on her desk, this beautiful little boy with eyes like hers, eyes that were bruised and a little broken and far too honest. There was so much proof that his parents were unfit, and yet, he’d been given back to them. Again. Because there were rules and technicalities and loopholes, because there were too many children in danger and not nearly enough money or homes or people to help.

So this little boy with the shadowed soul and the too-honest eyes would get hurt again, and again and again.

Ronnie Wilkins needed an angel.



25

“Nineteen years, Mercedes, and that’s what you have to say to me?” Mama’s face creases in still-familiar irritation, and she opens the door all the way. “Get in here.”

“No. I’m not here to talk. You need to go back, or go wherever you want, as long as it isn’t to my job.”

“I didn’t raise you to be this rude to your mother.”

“No, you raised me to be molested by my father.”

Her open hand cracks against my cheek, and she stares at her palm, horrified, because it’s easier than looking at my scarred face.

“Esperanza told me about the prognosis,” I continue after a moment. “She told me about what you all want to do. Bring him to the house, let him die around family. But he’s not dead yet and if you think for one moment I will ever even consider letting him around children . . .”

“He never hurt any of the others.”

“Hurting me was enough. I can’t stop you from doing the petition, but I won’t be putting my name to it. Not as a victim, not as an agent, and I’ll be writing the judge to speak against it.”

“This isn’t a conversation to be having in the hallway,” she frets.

“We’re not having a conversation, Mamá. I am telling you a thing I will never do.”

Her hair is almost entirely silver but still thick and healthy, braided back into a coiled knot low at the base of her skull, single-hair wisps curling away from her scalp as they protest the severity. Her face is creased with wrinkles, her dark brown eyes are the same as I remember. She’s her and not her. Even her clothes are nearly the same, an embroidered white blouse and long, multi-tiered colorful skirt, the only things she’d ever buy for herself, because Papá fell in love with her in those skirts, she used to tell us. If the necklines are a little higher than they used to be, her arms thicker under the collar ruffle, well. It’s been decades.

“Go home, Mamá,” I tell her, and despite everything, my tone is gentle. Almost kind. “Go home to everyone else and accept the fact that you lost your youngest daughter a very long time ago.”

“But I didn’t lose you,” she insists, tears tracking down her weathered cheeks. “You are right here before me, more stubborn than ever.”

“You lost me the minute I told you what Papá was doing, and you said I needed to be a good daughter.”

“He was your Papá,” she says helplessly. “He was—”

Part of me recognizes the oddity of her speaking English. English was for school and work and errands. At home we only spoke Spanish unless the older kids were working on homework. The entire neighborhood—literally, the entire neighborhood—was family, all the cousins and second cousins and aunts and uncles, the grandparents and almost grandparents, the older siblings who married and moved into houses just down the street or around the corner. Unless it was schoolwork, you didn’t hear English until you left the neighborhood and went past the corner stores. Even then, you were as likely to hear Spanish until you got deeper into town.

I take her face between my hands, lean forward, and kiss her forehead. When Vic did it to me, it was support. Now, it’s goodbye. “Go home. Your daughter is lost, and she is never coming home. She found a better family on her own.”

“That man, that agent,” she spits. “He took you away!”

“He rescued me. Once from the cabin, and once from you. Goodbye, Mamá.”

I turn and walk away, and there’s a part of me aware of the sobbing little girl in the back of my mind, the hurt child who couldn’t understand why her parents did what they did, why no one else cared. Be patient, I want to tell that little girl. It gets worse, but then it gets better. Then we get rescued.