Chapter 1 — Get Off My Porch

“You don’t have a home here anymore.

You’re an ex-con.

Get off my porch before I call the cops.”

I had spent four years and eight months in a state correctional facility in Texas, and I promise you that not one hour of it cut as deep as those two sentences did, spoken by the person I had trusted most in the world.

I had been released that very morning, with a clear plastic bag holding everything I owned, my release papers, and a single burning purpose that had kept me alive through every day of my sentence: getting back my son.

Mason was four.

For the first three years of his life he had stayed with me under the facility’s infant-care program, and then, when he turned three, the state had moved him into emergency foster care, and I had spent the last twelve months counting the seconds.

That morning, when I finally picked him up from the agency, he ran into my arms without a single word, and then he said the thing I will hear for the rest of my life.

“Mommy.

I thought you weren’t ever coming back for me.”

I held him against my chest and soaked his little jacket with my tears and made him a promise I did not yet know how I was going to keep.

“I am never, ever going to leave you alone again, baby.

Never.”

And then I took him home — to the two-bedroom condo my late mother had left me — and knocked on my own front door.

And it was my best friend of fifteen years who opened it, wearing my dead mother’s sapphire earrings, holding a glass of red wine.

Chapter 2 — Paige

Before I was sentenced, I had signed a power of attorney giving Paige control of the condo — trusting her, my roommate from college, my maid of honor, my emergency contact, to pay the fees from my savings and keep my few things safe until I came home.