Chapter 15: The Binder

Erin's POV

I took the Friday bus home alone, because Alec had a fever and I had a mother.

Garrity Falls looked the same as it always did in February, brown and low and wet.

I had a key to the house, and I stood on the porch for a full minute before I used it.

In my first life I had never come home on a Friday without being told to.

"It's open," my mother called from the kitchen. "I'm not hiding anything."

I put my bag down in the hall and went to the doorway.

She had cleared the whole table.

In the middle of it sat a green accordion folder, so thick that the elastic strap had stretched.

Across the front, in my mother's square handwriting, it said ERIN.

"I wanted to show you before tomorrow," she said. "So you can be angry in private first."

I sat down across from her.

I did not touch the folder.

I had been afraid of my mother for as long as I could remember, and I had spent a whole life being polite to her, and I was tired of both.

She slid off the strap herself.

The first thing inside was a single sheet from the pediatrician's office, dated the month I was born.

Under it, in her handwriting, there was a list.

Walk by one.

Reading by four.

Piano, then violin, then science camp.

Fairmont, early admission.

Medical school.

"I started this the week they put you in my arms," she said. "I wrote down everything I would never let happen to you."

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