Jerrica was sixteen and she had a list.
She kept it in the back of a composition notebook she'd bought with babysitting money from the family two years ago – the Delgados, who had been decent people with an overcrowded house and a genuine inability to remember which of the three of them was which. The list was titled, in her careful block letters: THINGS THAT ARE ACTUALLY TRUE.
It had started as a kind of game, something to anchor herself when the world felt particularly untethered. But it had grown, over the months, into something more like a doctrine.
Maddie is afraid of thunderstorms but pretends she isn't.
Bella lies about small things and tells the truth about big ones.
I am the oldest and that means something even when no one acts like it does.
We have the same mother. We are not the same.
People decide what you are before you open your mouth.
That last one she had underlined twice. She'd added it after the Holloways – the current Holloways, the ones whose spare bedroom smelled of cedar and whose refrigerator was always slightly too full – after Mr. Holloway had handed her a dish towel on her first night and said, with a kind and completely thoughtless smile, you girls can handle the kitchen, right? That's always been more of a woman's thing in our house.
She had taken the dish towel. She had not said anything. But she had written it down that night, because writing things down was the only form of protest available to her, and protest, even quiet protest, was something she refused to give up.
Jerrica was sitting at the desk in the corner of the room she shared with her sisters when Ms. Perrin finished whatever she was saying downstairs and the front door clicked shut. She heard Bella and Maddie come back down the hallway, heard the soft thump of them settling onto the bed behind her. She didn't turn around.
"Well?" she said.
"Same family," Bella said. "Through spring."
Jerrica let out a slow breath. "Together?"
"Together."
She nodded, just once, and turned back to her notebook. She added a new line to the list.
Together is the only thing that matters.
She underlined it. Then she closed the notebook and finally turned around to face her sisters, because they needed her face, and because she needed theirs, and because some truths don't belong on paper at all.
There were three kinds of quiet in the Holloway house, and Maddie had learned to tell them apart before she learned long division.
There was the quiet after a social worker left – the held-breath kind, where all three of them would sit absolutely still until they heard the car pull out of the gravel driveway. That quiet meant safety, at least for another few weeks.
There was the quiet of Jerrica working, her pencil scratching slow and deliberate across whatever notebook she'd found, lips pressed tight, brow folded in on itself. That quiet had a shape to it, almost like a wall. Don't disturb her. Don't ruin it. She was thinking, and thinking was the only currency any of them had.
And then there was this quiet. The kind that followed bad news.
Maddie sat on the edge of the bathtub, her feet not quite reaching the floor. She was eleven, though she sometimes forgot what that meant. Was eleven old enough to hate someone? She felt old enough. She pressed her thumbnail into the grout between the tiles and picked at it, steady and mechanical, until a little white crescent came away under her nail.
Down the hall, she could hear Ms. Perrin's voice floating up through the vent. Cheerful. Efficient. The voice of someone who had delivered bad news so many times that it had been sanded smooth of all its edges.
Temporary placement. Just through the spring. The family has been wonderful with the transition.
Wonderful. Maddie turned the word over in her mouth like a stone.
The door creaked, and Bella slipped in without knocking. She never knocked. At fourteen she had already developed the particular grace of a girl who'd learned to take up as little space as possible, moving along the edges of rooms, sliding through gaps in conversations. She pulled the door shut behind her without a sound and sat down cross-legged on the bathmat, her dark hair falling forward over her shoulders.
"She's almost done," Bella said.
"I know."
"Jerrica's still in there. She's not crying."
"I know that too."
Bella picked at a loose thread on the bathmat. Outside, a car alarm started up somewhere distant and then stopped. "Do you think they'll split us up this time?"
The question landed heavy in the small room. Maddie kept her eyes on the grout.
"Ms. Perrin said they wouldn't."
"Ms. Perrin said a lot of things last time."
That was true, and they both knew it, so Maddie didn't answer. Last time, Ms. Perrin had said the same thing and they'd spent six weeks in separate houses on opposite ends of the county. Six weeks of Maddie eating dinner at a table with people who called her sweetie in voices that didn't know her at all, asking her if she liked school, if she liked soccer, if she liked their dog, as if liking things were still something she did freely and easily, as if it didn't cost her something each time.
"We'll figure it out," Maddie said finally, which was what Jerrica always said and therefore what Maddie said when Jerrica wasn't around to say it herself.
Bella looked up. Her eyes were dry but there was something careful in them, something held back and tended like a small flame kept from the wind. "You always say that."
"One of us has to."
A long pause. Then Bella said, quietly, almost to herself, "I hate that it has to be one of us at all."
Maddie had no answer for that. She just slid off the edge of the tub and sat down on the floor next to her sister, their shoulders touching, and they waited together in the third kind of quiet until it was time to go back out and face whatever cheerful, efficient thing was waiting for them on the other side of the door.