what?”
“That you would think she hired you because of your blood.”
I stared at her.
“Did she?”
Evelyn looked away.
And that was my answer.
Rage arrived before grief.
“She knew.”
“Yes.”
“She knew who I was the entire time.”
“Yes.”
I stepped backward.
“She let me clean her toilets.”
“Carly—”
“She let me scrub her floors.”
“My mother never saw it that way.”
“I don’t care how she saw it.”
People were looking at us.
I lowered my voice.
“For eight years, that woman watched me struggle and never told me she knew my mother.
Never told me she was family.”
“There are things you don’t understand.”
“Then explain them.”
Evelyn’s expression changed.
“I can’t.”
“Why?”
“Because there is still one person alive who knows what happened the night you were born.”
My skin prickled.
“Who?”
She looked at me.
“Your biological mother.”
Rose Whitaker was alive.
That
