The Holloways had a rule about Saturday mornings.
Everyone ate breakfast together. This had been presented to the sisters on their first weekend as though it were a gift — we're a family breakfast kind of house — and Mrs. Holloway had said it with the particular warmth of someone who had rehearsed the sentiment enough times that she'd stopped noticing it was a performance. Jerrica had smiled and said that sounded lovely. Bella had said nothing. Maddie had asked if they had orange juice with pulp or without, because she had opinions about pulp, and the question had broken the slight tension in the room and made everyone laugh, and Maddie had stored that information away the way she stored everything — which strategy worked, which version of herself fit which room.
The breakfast itself was fine. Mrs. Holloway made eggs scrambled too dry and toast buttered too thin, and Mr. Holloway read something on his phone with the focused expression of a man pretending to be less distracted than he was, and their son Marcus, who was thirteen and largely indifferent to the sisters' existence, ate standing up despite being asked repeatedly not to. It was ordinary in the specific way that other people's ordinary always was — slightly off, like a song played in the wrong key, recognizable but not quite right.
This particular Saturday, Jerrica had been up since five-thirty.
She'd lain in bed for an hour first, staring at the ceiling, running numbers in her head the way she did when she couldn't sleep — not math exactly, more like accounting. Six months. Twenty-six weeks. One hundred and eighty-some days before the case review, before the system turned its indifferent eye toward all three of them and made its determinations. She'd been doing this every morning since the letter arrived, as if counting down would somehow give her purchase on time, some way to grip it and slow it.
It never worked. She got up anyway.
By the time the rest of the house stirred, she had already been to the corner store two blocks over — the one run by a Yemeni man named Mr. Saleh who opened at six and kept a small bowl of wrapped candies on the counter for children, which Jerrica had always found quietly devastating — and back. She'd bought orange juice. The kind with pulp.
Maddie came downstairs last, her hair unbrushed, wearing a sweatshirt three sizes too large that had once belonged to a boy at a previous placement and that she refused to relinquish despite Bella's periodic campaigns against it. She sat down, saw the orange juice, and looked up at Jerrica with an expression that was almost comically earnest.
"You got pulp," she said.
"I got pulp."
Maddie poured herself a glass with the solemn satisfaction of someone receiving exactly what they deserved after a long wait. She drank half of it standing at the counter, then carried the rest to the table and climbed into her chair. She was small for eleven — small in a way that Jerrica sometimes thought was less about genetics than about something more deliberate, some unconscious self-compression.
"What are we doing today?" Maddie asked.
"I have to study," Jerrica said.
"You always have to study."
"That's because I always have to study."
"Bella said she'd take me to the park," Maddie said, looking across the table at Bella, who was staring into her coffee — she'd started drinking it two placements ago, black, as if she were forty-five and tired — with the expression of someone who had technically agreed to something and was now quietly renegotiating with herself about it.
"I said maybe the park," Bella said.
"You said probably."
"Probably and maybe are not the same thing."
"They're close."
"They're really not."
Jerrica watched this exchange with the particular affection she'd never learned to articulate — the way the two of them orbited each other, always bickering, never actually angry, the argument itself a kind of contact. She thought sometimes that Maddie picked fights with Bella the way other kids sought hugs, that the friction was the point.
"I'll take you to the park," Jerrica said. "After lunch. I need the morning."
Maddie immediately brightened. "Can we go to the one with the creek?"
"If it's not too cold."
"It's not cold. It's almost April."
"It's forty-one degrees."
"That's almost April temperature."
Jerrica opened her mouth to respond and then closed it, because the logic was, in its own way, airtight. She looked at Bella, who had the ghost of a smile behind her coffee cup.
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She studied at the desk in their shared room while the sounds of the house moved around her — Marcus's video game through the wall, Mrs. Holloway vacuuming somewhere below, the periodic creak of Bella moving around, sitting, standing, sitting again. Bella was restless on weekends in a way she wasn't during the week. During the week she had the structure of school to move through, the periods and bells and required presences. On weekends the hours went formless and something in her didn't know what to do with that.
Jerrica's AP History notes were spread across the desk in a system that looked like chaos but was, in fact, deeply organized — color coded, cross-referenced, the kind of studying that teachers sometimes described as impressive and that Jerrica privately thought of as the only thing fully under her control. She could not control where she lived or for how long. She could not control who made decisions about her sisters. But she could control this — the careful architecture of knowledge, the way a fact learned well enough became something permanent that no one could reassess or remove or redirect.
She had wanted to be a lawyer since she was thirteen. Not because someone had told her she could, but because no one had, and she had decided to be contrary about it.
She was in the middle of a passage about Reconstruction when Bella appeared in the doorway.
"Can I ask you something?"
Jerrica didn't look up. "You're going to regardless."
Bella came in and sat on the edge of her own bed, drawing her knees up, wrapping her arms around them. She had the careful posture of someone about to say something sideways, approaching it from an angle. Jerrica knew this posture. She set her pencil down.
"There's a showcase," Bella said. "At school. Next Friday. The art department does it every spring." She was picking at a thread on her jeans. "Mr. Okafor asked me if I wanted to submit something."
Jerrica turned in her chair. "And do you?"
A shrug. The elaborate, noncommittal shrug of a girl who wanted something badly enough that admitting it felt dangerous. "He said my charcoal series was — he used the word striking. I don't know. It's probably nothing."
"Bella."
"I just don't know if it's worth the—" She gestured vaguely. "The whole thing. Setting it up. People looking at it. People having opinions."
"People having good opinions."
"You don't know that."
"Mr. Okafor does."
Bella was quiet. Outside, Marcus's video game produced a series of explosions and then went silent. "Mrs. Holloway would have to sign a permission form," she said finally. "For the submission. Since we're—" She didn't finish the sentence. Since we're minors in their care. She never finished that sentence. None of them did.
"She'll sign it," Jerrica said.
"You don't know that either."
"I'll ask her. If you want me to."
Bella looked at her. "You'd do that."
"Of course I would. Why is that surprising?"
Bella didn't answer, which was its own kind of answer. Jerrica turned it over. There were things she and Bella didn't say to each other — whole territories of feeling that had been tacitly agreed upon as off-limits, not out of hostility but out of a shared understanding that some things, once opened, were hard to close again. But every now and then she caught a glimpse of what lived in that territory, and it always surprised her. How much Bella assumed she had to do alone. How deeply she'd internalized the idea that asking was an imposition.
"You should submit the charcoals," Jerrica said. "The ones from November?"
A small nod.
"Those were good, Bella. Not just good. They were—" She searched for the right word and landed on the honest one. "They were the kind of thing that makes you feel something afterward, even when you're not looking at them anymore."
Bella's expression did something complicated. She looked down at her knees. "Mr. Okafor said something like that."
"Mr. Okafor is right."
A long pause. Then, quietly: "Okay."
"Okay you'll submit them?"
"Okay I'll think about it." But there was the smallest possible hint of a smile at the corner of her mouth, and Jerrica recognized it as the Bella equivalent of yes.
The park with the creek was technically called Riverside Commons on the map, but Maddie called it the Narnia Park because of the way you had to go through a gap in an overgrown hedge to reach the creek path, stepping through from the maintained grass and the playground equipment into something wilder and less tended. Jerrica had been skeptical the first time — it was still just a park, still inside the city — but she'd had to concede that the hedge did something, that passing through it produced a genuine shift in the quality of the air and the sound and the light filtering through the canopy.
Maddie led the way through, as she always did, ducking without thinking. Jerrica had to angle sideways.
The creek was low for April, picking its way over the stones with a sound that was less rushing than murmuring. Maddie went immediately to its edge, crouching down to examine whatever the water had deposited since the last time she'd been here. This was her primary activity at the creek. She was cataloguing it. She had a notebook — a cheap one, the marble-patterned kind from the dollar section — in which she kept records of what she found. Stones organized by color and shape. Feathers. Bottle caps. Once, memorably, a child's shoe.
"There's a new one," she announced, holding up a stone the size of her palm. It was pale gray with a vein of darker gray running through it diagonally. "Look at the line in it. Like someone drew it."
Jerrica crouched beside her. "Quartz intrusion, maybe. Or a fault line. A tiny one."
"A tiny earthquake made this?"
"Over millions of years, yeah."
Maddie turned the stone over in her hands with the solemn attention she gave to all her findings. Then she set it carefully in the front pocket of the ridiculous oversized sweatshirt. Jerrica had long since stopped questioning what happened to the stones once Maddie pocketed them. They went somewhere. The accounting of them was Maddie's business.
They sat on a flat rock at the creek's edge, the cold coming up through the stone beneath them. Maddie pulled her knees to her chest, mirroring — Jerrica noticed — the same posture Bella had used on the bed an hour ago. She wondered if they knew they did that, borrowed each other's bodies without thinking.
"Jerrica," Maddie said.
"Mm."
"Is something happening? With the placement?"
Jerrica went still in a way she hoped wasn't visible. She'd been careful. She and Bella had agreed, without quite discussing it, not to tell Maddie yet. Not because they wanted to keep things from her, but because Maddie carried things. She swallowed information whole and then processed it in silence for days, wearing the worry in the set of her shoulders and the way she stopped eating much at dinner and the way the pretending got louder. They were waiting until they had something more concrete to offer alongside the difficult truth.
"Why do you ask?" Jerrica said. Neutral. Careful.
"Because you've been different. Since Tuesday." Maddie was looking at the creek, not at her. "You do this thing when you're worried. You wash dishes that are already clean."
Jerrica thought about the pan she'd scrubbed twice. "I do not."
"You do. You also re-read things. Like you'll read the same paragraph like four times. You were doing it this morning." She finally looked over. Her eyes were direct and entirely without drama, and Jerrica was struck, as she sometimes was, by how much lived behind them. How much Maddie noticed and catalogued and pocketed the way she pocketed stones, quietly, for later. "You don't have to tell me," Maddie said. "But you don't have to pretend either."
There was a long silence. The creek moved over its stones, indifferent and patient.
"My birthday is going to cause some paperwork," Jerrica said finally. "Legal stuff. I'm dealing with it."
Maddie nodded slowly. "Is it bad paperwork?"
"It's complicated paperwork."
"But we're okay? The three of us?"
Jerrica looked at her — this small, careful, deeply observant child in her enormous sweatshirt — and felt the weight of the answer move through her chest. She thought about what was true and what was useful and where those two things overlapped.
"We're okay right now," she said. "And I'm going to work very hard to make sure we stay that way."
It wasn't a promise. She'd learned not to make promises she couldn't keep, had learned it the way you learn most important things — through the specific, memorable pain of having one broken. But it was something close to a promise. The shape of one, at least.
Maddie seemed to understand the distinction. She leaned over and rested her head briefly against Jerrica's arm — not quite a hug, too quick for that, more like a tap, a point of contact — and then straightened up and went back to examining the creek.
"There's a blue one," she said, pointing downstream. "See? By the big rock."
Jerrica looked. There was indeed a stone with a faint blue tinge to it, half submerged. "You want it?"
"No. I just wanted you to see it too."
Jerrica looked at the stone a moment longer. The water moved over it and the light shifted and it gleamed for a second like something worth finding.
"I see it," she said.
They sat there until the cold made Maddie's teeth chatter, and then they walked home through the Narnia hedge with Maddie's pockets heavier than before, and Jerrica let her narrate the stone collection the whole way back, and she listened to every word.