right order, so that Rourke couldn’t flip the story around, and so that Tasha didn’t lose her brother into the system in all the chaos. By sunrise the people who needed to know, knew. Within a week Rourke was sitting in a county jail facing a list of charges I won’t read out here, except to say one of them was for what he did to a four-year-old’s face over a cup of spilled juice.
Their mother went into a program. Whether it took, I honestly can’t tell you. That part of the story isn’t finished and may never have a clean end.
But Tasha and Eli went to live with their grandmother, two counties over. A good, strong woman in a small clean house. Maria checked her out herself. We all did, in our way.
That was three years ago now.
Tasha’s twenty-one. Every year, on the anniversary of
