Chapter 16: Terms of Surrender

We read the emails until dawn.

Cass sat cross-legged on the floor with a laptop on her knees, Sabina sat at the card table with a legal pad, and I paced.

There were four hundred and six messages from Bernadette to the Judge over three years, and they were not about money.

They were about us.

I read one aloud from the laptop screen.

"C., the Mazur girl has been seen at the courthouse. Please have the clerk keep a note of every request. B."

"And the answer?" Cass asked.

"Understood. I will look after the clerk. C."

I kept reading.

Bernadette had been tracking me since the day I turned twenty-six and signed up for a library card in Cleveland.

She had a name for my file.

She called it the Mazur matter.

She called Cass the loose one and Sabina the dependable one, and in a message from last March she had written, Dependable is the word for a good dog.

Sabina sat very still when I read that.

"She's right," Sabina said quietly.

"She's not."

"Dell."

"She is a liar, and a thief, and a bad judge of dogs," I said. "Sit up."

Sabina sat up.

It was the first time since the dormitory that I had looked at her and seen only her.

The sun came up gray over the harbor.

I took the legal pad out of her hands, turned to a clean page, and wrote at the top, TERMS.

"I want to say something, and I want you both to hear it before I change my mind," I said.

They looked at me.

"Sabina. I'm not going to call you my sister yet."

Keep reading free with an account. Start She Raised Us on Our Dead Parents' Settlement, So We Crashed Her Gala from Chapter 1, then sign up free to read the rest of this chapter.