The letter came on a Tuesday, which felt wrong. Bad news, Jerrica had always thought, should arrive on Mondays, when everything was already braced for it. Tuesdays had a false promise to them. Tuesdays felt like maybe things would be ordinary.
She found it on the kitchen counter between a cereal box and a stack of unopened mail belonging to the Holloways, her name typed on the front in the flat, indifferent font of government correspondence. She almost mistook it for something routine. She'd received enough of those — school enrollment forms, Medicaid renewal notices, the occasional letter from a caseworker that said nothing in three paragraphs that couldn't have been said in one sentence.
But the return address stopped her.
Office of Child and Family Services. Case Review Division.
She picked it up carefully, the way you pick up something you already know is going to hurt, and carried it upstairs without opening it. She sat on the edge of her bed and looked at it for a long moment. Through the window, she could hear Maddie in the backyard, talking to herself the way she did when she thought no one was listening — narrating some private world under her breath, building something out of sticks or stones or whatever she'd found. It was the one place Maddie still let herself be eleven.
Jerrica opened the letter.
It was two pages. She read it twice, slowly, translating the bureaucratic language into plain meaning the way she'd taught herself to do. Words like transition planning and emancipation timeline and service eligibility reassessment that sounded almost benign until you held them up to the light and saw what they were actually saying.
What they were actually saying was this: in six months, she would turn eighteen. And on that birthday, she would no longer be a dependent of the state of New York. Her case would close. Her placement would end. And the question of what happened to Bella and Maddie — whether they stayed at the Holloways, whether they were moved, whether they stayed together — would be determined entirely separately from any question of what happened to her.
She set the letter down on her knee.
Outside, Maddie laughed at something — a real laugh, bright and unguarded, the kind she only produced when she thought no one could hear. Jerrica stared at the wall.
She had known this was coming, the way you know winter is coming — abstractly, in theory, a fact held at arm's length. But there is a difference between knowing a thing and holding the letter that makes it real.
She folded it carefully along its original creases and tucked it into the back of her composition notebook, behind the list. Then she went downstairs and washed the breakfast dishes that had been sitting in the sink since morning, because someone had to and Mrs. Holloway had a tendency to leave them until they became Jerrica's problem anyway, and because doing something with her hands was the only way she knew to keep her mind from running too far ahead of itself.
She was halfway through the second pan when Bella came in through the back door, slightly breathless, her hair windblown in a way that suggested she hadn't been where she said she'd been.
"I thought you were at the library," Jerrica said without turning around.
A beat. "I was."
"The library closes at five on Tuesdays. It's quarter past."
Another beat, longer. Jerrica heard Bella set her bag down on a chair, heard the deliberate casualness of it. "I walked slow."
Jerrica turned off the faucet. She dried her hands on the dish towel — Mr. Holloway's woman's dish towel — and turned around. Bella was already looking somewhere else, rearranging the contents of her bag with unnecessary concentration.
There was something Jerrica had learned about Bella over years of close quarters and thin walls: she was an excellent liar about small things and a terrible one about anything that actually mattered. The small lies came out smooth and even. The real ones had a kind of texture to them, a slight change in the way she held her shoulders.
Her shoulders, right now, were practically at her ears.
Jerrica decided to let it go. She had enough.
"Sit down," she said instead.
Bella looked up sharply. "Why?"
"Because I need to tell you something and I'd rather not do it while you're halfway out the door."
Bella studied her for a moment, reading her face the way all three of them had learned to read faces — as a matter of survival, of knowing what the room required before you spoke. Whatever she found there must have been serious enough, because she sat down.
Jerrica pulled out the chair across from her. She thought about getting the letter, decided against it. Some things you should be able to say in your own words.
"My birthday is in six months," she started.
"I know when your birthday is."
"When I turn eighteen, my case closes. Automatically. Legally, I'm no longer a foster kid. I'm just a person." She said it flatly, not performing anything. "That process starts a review of the whole placement. Yours and Maddie's too."
Bella was very still. "What kind of review?"
"The kind where they reassess everything. Whether this placement is still appropriate. Whether it stays or changes." She paused. "Whether we stay together."
The kitchen was quiet. Through the window, they could still hear Maddie outside, her voice low and continuous, telling her private story to the yard.
"They could split us up," Bella said. Not a question.
"They could."
"But Ms. Perrin said—"
"Ms. Perrin isn't our caseworker anymore. There's someone new. Daniel something. I haven't met him yet." She watched Bella's face work through it. "I wanted you to know before I figured out what to do. I didn't want to already have a plan and just tell you the plan. I wanted—" She stopped. The words felt unfamiliar in her mouth. "I wanted to tell you first."
Bella looked at her for a long moment. Something moved across her face that Jerrica couldn't quite name — not quite gratitude, not quite fear, something in between. "Okay," she said finally.
"Okay?"
"Okay, you told me." She looked down at the table. "What are we going to do?"
We. Jerrica felt something loosen, slightly, in her chest. "I don't know yet. I need to find out what our options are. Legally. There's something called kinship guardianship, where an adult family member—"
"We don't have any adult family members."
"I know. But there might be other arrangements. If I can show I'm a stable—" She heard how it sounded and stopped. She was sixteen and had forty-three dollars in a savings account at a bank she'd never visited in person. Stable was a long road from here. "I'm going to figure it out," she said instead.
Bella nodded slowly. Then she said, quietly, "You always have to figure everything out, don't you."
It wasn't quite an accusation. But it wasn't quite not one either. Jerrica met her eyes.
"One of us has to," she said.
It was what Maddie always said. Bella recognized it — Jerrica saw the recognition flicker — and something in her expression shifted, became briefly and unexpectedly young.
"I know," Bella said. "I know that." She was quiet for a moment. "I just wonder sometimes what it costs you."
Jerrica had no answer for that. So she stood up, and tucked the chair back under the table, and went to the back door to call Maddie in for dinner.
Outside, Maddie was crouched over something in the dirt, completely absorbed, her hair falling across her face. She had built a small structure out of sticks and flat stones — a little architecture of nothing, meticulous and purposeless and entirely her own.
"Mad," Jerrica called. "Come in."
Maddie looked up. Even from the doorway, Jerrica could see the quick calculation that crossed her face — the thing she'd watched her do a hundred times, the snap decision about what the room needed, whether to be loud or quiet, to take up space or disappear. Even out here alone, she did it. Even when there was no one to read.
Maddie is afraid of thunderstorms but pretends she isn't. That was what the list said. What the list didn't say, because Jerrica hadn't yet found words for it, was this: Maddie was also afraid of everything else, and she pretended about all of it, and the pretending was costing her something too.
"Coming," Maddie said brightly, and got up, and left her little structure in the dirt without looking back at it.
Jerrica held the door open. The kitchen light spilled out into the yard, warm and temporary, and for one moment all three of them existed inside it together — Jerrica holding the door, Bella still at the table, Maddie crossing the dark grass toward the light.
Six months, Jerrica thought. Six months to figure out how to hold this.
She let Maddie pass, and then she went inside and closed the door behind them.