Chapter 2

Adam held the earring by the stone, careful to keep his fingers away from the blood.

I watched his face until he glanced down at my hand. For a second, he looked uncomfortable. I thought he was about to open the glove compartment and find me something to press against the cut.

“I’ll cover for you this time,” he said. “Just don’t touch her things again.”

He took a sanitizing wipe from the center console and worked it around the post. He turned the stud over, checked the setting under the dome light, and wiped it again.

A drop of blood landed on my thigh. I watched it spread into the fabric. I knew I ought to close my hand or ask him for a tissue. I sat there with my palm open anyway.

Adam wrapped the earring in a clean tissue and tucked it into the glove compartment. Then he looked at me.

“What are you waiting for? I told you to get in the back.”

“Take me up to the street,” I said. “I’ll get a cab.”

“Fine. I’ve got the company gala tonight. I still have to take her to pick out a dress.”

The Sanchez shipping company held that gala every year. The invitations went to port officials, contractors, and people his father wanted photographed shaking his hand. I’d spent a week helping Adam sort the seating chart.

He drove up the ramp and stopped at the curb. Rain was coming down hard enough to bounce off the hood. I knew there was an umbrella in the trunk. I’d put it there myself.

“Get yourself home,” he said.

I shut the door. He pulled away before I’d taken my hand off it.

No cab stopped. By the time I reached the bus shelter, my sleeves were soaked through and my hair was dripping down my collar. A woman on the bench moved her shopping bag to make room for me. She looked at the blood on my hand, then at my face. I stayed standing.

What I wanted to remember was the way Adam had looked at me in the car. What I kept remembering was the first time he’d stood between me and a crowd.

I was eighteen when my father posted a video admitting to the affair. Until then, I’d known him as a man my mother called on birthdays and never expected to pick up.

He said his wife had been pregnant when my mother began calling the house. My mother kept calling, even after his wife begged her to stop. In the video, he said he’d let it go on because he thought he could keep both women waiting for him to make up his mind. His wife died by suicide. The baby died with her.

My mother had expected him to marry her after that. Instead, he cut her off. She told him he had a daughter to think about. He told her to stop calling.

For eighteen years, she raised me alone. It took strangers online less than a week to find out who she was. Then they found my name, my college, and the building where I lived.

My mother jumped from the roof of her apartment building. After she died, the messages kept coming. So did the women who waited at the campus gates with rotten eggs and bags of spoiled produce. Some had been cheated on themselves. One told me about her husband while she dug an egg out of her coat pocket.

“A mistress’s daughter grows up to be a mistress,” she said. “Everybody knows that.”

Inside the gates, my classmates whispered. Outside, the women got close enough to tell me what they thought of my face.

“You look just like her. Bet you know exactly what to do with a married man.”

I’d been living in a dorm room my mother had paid for. I wore a coat she’d bought me. At eighteen, I couldn’t work out how to grieve for her and be horrified by what she’d done. I’d hear those women shouting and think I owed them the chance to say it. So I kept my head down.

It went on for most of a year.

Then one afternoon, a woman reached for my sleeve at the gate. Adam caught her by the wrist before she got hold of me.

“Who told you a mistress’s daughter has to grow up to be one?” he asked.

The woman looked past him at the black car waiting by the curb. She knew the Sanchez name. Most people in that neighborhood did. He let go of her wrist and asked what her daughter did for a living.

“She’s an accountant,” the woman said. “At a big firm.”

“And what do you do?”

She hesitated. One of the women beside her answered for her.

“She cooks for a construction crew.”

Adam nodded. “So your daughter got to choose what she did with her life. Why doesn’t she?”

He pointed at me. Nobody had asked me a question out there in months. For a second, I didn’t know where to look.

The crowd thinned after that. A few women still showed up the next day. By the end of the week, I could walk through the gates without checking both sides of the street.

Adam started coming by even when there was nobody to run off. He brought an umbrella when it rained and crossed to the shady side of the street when the sun was strong. After I finished studying at the library, he’d be outside waiting to walk me back to my dorm.

Once, in the dining hall, he saw two people tip the scraps from their trays onto the seat I’d been saving. I started to get up. He put a hand on the back of my chair.

“Stay,” he said quietly.

Then he looked at the two of them.

“Which one of you got to pick your parents?”