# Chapter 1
The grocery store was the worst.
Not the holidays. Not the school buses that passed her apartment at 7:15 and again at 3:40, though those were bad. Not the birthday aisles at the dollar store, not the pediatrician's office she still drove past on the way to work because she had never learned another route. The grocery store.
She was standing in the cereal aisle when it happened again. A woman with two kids — a boy and a girl, close in age, the boy maybe a head taller — was reaching for a box of something on the top shelf. The girl was pulling at the hem of her mother's jacket. The boy was reading the back of a cereal box with the exaggerated concentration of a child who has just learned that reading can be performed.
Marlene turned her cart and went the other way.
She did not cry. She had not cried in public in six years. The crying had stopped not because the grief had stopped but because the body eventually learns what the mind refuses to accept — that no one is coming. That the sound goes nowhere. That the particular pitch of a woman weeping in a cereal aisle makes other shoppers look at their phones.
She bought milk, bread, eggs, coffee. Single servings of everything. The checkout girl did not look at her. Marlene did not need her to.
In the parking lot she sat in her car for eleven minutes. She knew it was eleven because the dashboard clock said 5:47 when she sat down and 5:58 when she started the engine. In between she held the steering wheel with both hands and breathed the way the court-appointed therapist had taught her — in for four, hold for four, out for four — and she thought about Aiden's hands.
He'd had her hands. Everybody said so. Long fingers, square at the tips, the nails always a little too short because he bit them when he was thinking. He was three when they took him. He'd been thinking a lot, those last weeks. She hadn't known what he was thinking about. She hadn't thought to ask, because he was three, and what does a three-year-old think about that a mother needs to ask.
She knew now. She had spent eight years knowing.
He'd been thinking about why the apartment was so cold. Why the lights didn't always come on. Why Mommy slept on the couch some nights and didn't get up when he called. He'd been thinking about the woman who came to the apartment with a clipboard and a smile that didn't reach her eyes, and why that woman kept asking him questions about food.
Chloe had been four. Chloe had understood more than Aiden, which was worse.
Chloe had asked, on the last morning, standing in the hallway of the county building in a coat that was too big for her because Marlene had bought it at Goodwill a size up so it would last the winter — Chloe had asked, "Are you coming back for us?"
And Marlene had said yes.
She had said yes because it was true. She had said yes because she was going to get clean, and she was going to get a job, and she was going to find an apartment with heat that worked, and she was going to come back for them. She had said yes because the alternative was to say *I don't know*, and you do not say *I don't know* to a four-year-old in a coat that doesn't fit her.
She did get clean. She did get a job. She found an apartment — not with heat that worked, exactly, but with heat that mostly worked, which was more than she'd had before.
By then the adoption had been finalized.
The caseworker had explained it to her in a conference room with no windows. Marlene remembered the room more clearly than the words. Gray carpet. A table with a scratch along one edge that someone had tried to fill with wood putty. A clock on the wall that was four minutes fast. The caseworker's hands, folded on the table, the nails painted a pale pink that Marlene had stared at while the woman said *permanency* and *best interest* and *the children have bonded with their placement* and *I know this is difficult*.
Difficult.
The word had sat in the room like a wrong-sized shoe.
She had signed. She had signed because the lawyer they gave her said it was better to sign than to fight and lose, because losing meant the court would say she was unfit, and *unfit* would follow her, and at least if she signed it was voluntary, at least if she signed the record would say she chose this, she agreed, she consented.
She had not consented. She had been a woman standing in a room with no windows, holding a pen someone else put in her hand, and she had written her name on a line because every other line had already been written for her.
That was eight years ago.
Aiden was eleven now. Chloe was twelve.
She did the math constantly. She could not stop doing the math. Every September she thought: *fourth grade, fifth grade. Fifth grade, sixth grade.* She imagined school pictures she would never see. She imagined loose teeth, and science projects, and the way their voices must have changed — were changing — would change. She imagined Chloe's hair, which had been dark and fine and always tangled at the back, and whether someone was brushing it for her, and whether Chloe still let someone brush it or whether she had reached the age where she did it herself and hated being touched.
She imagined Aiden's hands.
At work she was fine. She cashiered at a hardware store off Route 9, and the work was simple and constant, and the men who came in for drill bits and caulk did not ask her about her life. Her manager, a man named Phil who had been at the store for twenty-two years, had once asked her if she had kids. She had said no. The word had come out before she could catch it, and afterward she had gone to the bathroom and stood with her back against the door and pressed her fists into her eyes until the pressure made colors.
She had kids. She had two kids. They were alive, somewhere, in a house she had never seen, with people whose names she had been told once and immediately tried to forget and could not. The Warrens. David and Christine Warren. She had Googled them once, at the public library, on a computer where the search history would not follow her home. She had found a photo — a family photo, taken at what looked like a pumpkin patch, the four of them standing in front of a hay bale. Aiden was smiling. Chloe was not.
Marlene had looked at that photo for forty-five minutes.
She had looked at Chloe's face — the not-smiling, the arms crossed, the way she was standing slightly apart from the others — and she had built an entire cathedral of hope inside that posture. *She's not happy. She remembers me. She's waiting for me. She knows I'm coming back.*
And then she had closed the browser, because the other possibility — that Chloe was simply a twelve-year-old having a bad day at a pumpkin patch, that the crossed arms meant nothing, that the not-smiling was just a girl who didn't feel like smiling for a camera — was a possibility Marlene could not survive.
She drove home from the grocery store. She put the milk in the fridge. She put the bread on the counter. She did not turn on the television because the television was full of families, and the families were full of children, and the children were full of the ordinary things — laughter, complaints, the specific weight of a child leaning against you on a couch — that she had lost and could not name the losing of.
There was no word for what she was.
She was not a bereaved mother. Her children were alive. She was not a birth mother — that was the term the system used, and it was a term that sounded like a job description, like something you did once and then someone else took over. She was not an ex-mother. There was no such thing. You do not stop being a mother because a court says so. You do not stop being a mother because you signed a paper in a room with no windows. You stop being a mother when you stop loving them, and she had not stopped, and she would not stop, and the love had nowhere to go.
It just sat inside her. It grew heavier every year.
She ate dinner standing at the counter. Bread with butter. Coffee, black. She washed the knife and the cup and put them in the rack and wiped the counter and stood there with the dishcloth in her hand, looking at the kitchen, which was clean and quiet and hers.
The apartment had one bedroom. She slept in it. There was no second bedroom. She had chosen a one-bedroom on purpose, because a two-bedroom would have had a door she couldn't open, a room she couldn't enter, a space that would have asked her, every single day, who it was for.
She knew who it was for.
She sat on the edge of her bed. She picked up her phone. She opened the browser. She typed the name — *Christine Warren* — and then she closed the browser without pressing search.
She did this every night.
She set the phone on the nightstand. She turned off the lamp. She lay in the dark and listened to the building — the pipes, the neighbor's television, the particular silence of a home with no children in it, which is not silence at all but a sound, a specific and relentless sound, the sound of a question that nobody is asking and nobody is answering and nobody, in the morning, will remember to ask.
Aiden would be eleven now. Chloe would be twelve.
She said their names in the dark. Not out loud. She had stopped saying them out loud because the sound of her own voice saying their names in an empty apartment was a thing she could not bear more than once, and she had already borne it once, years ago, on a night she did not think about.
She said them the way you say a prayer you no longer believe in but cannot stop saying.
*Aiden. Chloe.*
*I'm still here.*
*I don't know if that matters to anyone but me.*