Chapter 8 - What Emily Chose to Keep
Emily is placed with her aunt, Carol, three towns over — her mother's sister, someone Emily has met at exactly two holidays in her life and remembers mostly as a smell of vanilla and a voice that doesn't get sharp at the edges.
The social worker lets Emily pack one bag from the house on Larkspur Street.
Emily doesn't take clothes first. She takes the stuffed rabbit with the chewed ear from its hiding spot under the kennel floorboard.
She holds it against her chest the whole car ride, saying nothing, watching the house shrink in the rearview mirror until it's the size of a thumbnail and then gone altogether.
At Carol's house, there's a real bed with a real comforter with cartoon foxes on it. There's a nightlight shaped like a moon.
Emily sits on the edge of the bed for a long time before she lies down. She keeps waiting for someone to tell her to go outside.
No one does.
She falls asleep at 9:47 p.m. — Carol checks, later, moved by the strangeness of writing down a time that means nothing except that it is the first ordinary bedtime this child has had in longer than anyone yet knows.
She wakes up once, at 2 a.m., disoriented by the softness under her, momentarily certain the concrete floor and the wire mesh will reassert themselves the second she opens her eyes.
They don't.
Carol's voice, from the hallway, checking in without being asked: "You okay, sweetheart?"
"Yeah," Emily says, and means it, and is surprised by meaning it.
May you like
She falls back asleep holding the rabbit so tightly its remaining ear presses a small red mark into her cheek — a mark that will fade by morning, the kind bruises are supposed to be, temporary, forgettable, nothing anyone needs to hide under a sleeve.
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