ChapterOne
NOVA
It had takenme three months not to have an anxiety attack every time the front doorbell rang. I’d tried everything: therapy, deep breathing—hell, I’d even changed the doorbell tone, and later took it away altogether. My friends knew not to ring it; they just called when they were out the front. Even the food delivery guys didn’t ring anymore.
Maybe I should have tried desensitizing myself to the doorbell instead, because apparently, someone knocking had roughly the same effect anyway.
Breathing in and out, I walked toward the front door.
It hadn’t always been this way, obviously. No one is born with an aversion to doorbells. No, my brain—the wonderful and complex piece of equipment that it was—now associated the doorbell with the worst day of my life.
Even as I walked toward it now, the present was overlaid with memories of three months ago. Opening the door, smiling. Feeling the expression fall from my face as I took in the two policemen in front of me, their faces solemn. Collapsing on the ground, wailing, as they told me that my parents had crashed on the freeway and died instantly. Continuing to wail until one of the officers stood me up, holding me in his arms until the neighbors appeared.
Then Rita, my neighbor and one of my mother’s best friends, held me as I cried for the next six hours. Her daughter Chloe—my best friend—arrived hours later and took over, so her mother could properly grieve without trying to hold me together too.
Rita took care of the funeral arrangements. Oscar, her husband, ensured I ate, using that Dad tone that I’d never again hear from my own father to make sure I swallowed every single bite.
Since then, it’d been the worst twelve weeks of my life, but I was moving through life, existing. It was getting easier. Not better, but easier.
Except for the fucking front door.
Sucking deep breaths in through my nose and out through my mouth, I dragged myself back to the present.Open the door. It’s okay. It’s probably just Mormons or something.
My stomach dropped when I saw it wasn’t Mormons. I definitely would have preferred that to the sight of my father’s lawyer and an unknown woman.
“Miss Stone. It’s good to see you.” Mr. Lief, my dad’s lawyer, didn’t say I looked well, because I really didn’t. I looked tired, exhausted both physically and emotionally.
“It’s nice to see you too, Mr. Lief. I’m surprised, though?”
We’d done the reading of my parents’ wills. They’d left me everything, but as their only child, it was pretty standard. I’d sold my father’s partnership in his chiropractic firm back to his business partners. My mom had been a customer service clerk at the DMV. They didn’t have much except this house and their 401(k)s, so the whole process had been reasonably simple, especially as we didn’t have any close extended family. All my grandparents were gone, as well as my Uncle Jerry. My dad had been an only child.
“Not as surprised as I am. May I introduce Mrs. Janette Fischer? She’s from Child Protective Services.”
Well, now I was super confused.
Mrs. Fischer leaned forward and shook my hand. “Nice to meet you, Miss Stone.”
Smiling tightly, I returned the gesture. “Please, call me Nova.”
She nodded, the shadow of a smile passing over her face. “May we come in?”
I frowned but nodded, standing to the side as they stepped through the doorway. I was kind of glad I’d just been floating through life like a ghost, because the house was still clean from the last time Chloe had come over and baked me cookies, hovering like a mother hen as she tidied my house for me.
Janette Fischer looked around my childhood home, still filled with my mother’s knick-knacks and family pictures, as if my parents were just going to walk back in the door again. It screamedundealt with grief,but screw it.
I’d be ready when I was ready.
“I’m not sure what this visit is for, but I promise you, despite the baby face, I’m actually twenty-four,” I joked weakly.
Mr. Lief gives me a tight smile. “Sorry for the intrusion, but after Mrs. Fischer reached out, I thought it would be best if I sat in on this meeting. A familiar face, and all that.”
Mr. Lief had been my father’s golfing buddy since I was ten. If he wasn’t here in an official lawyer capacity…
“I’ll get straight to the point, Miss Stone.”
“Nova,” I corrected weakly, because I could already feel my heart beginning to pound too hard in my chest.
“Nova. I’m not sure if you’re aware of this, but a child has recently come into the care of the emergency foster system. An infant. His mother, unfortunately, died suddenly of a postpartum brain aneurysm two nights ago. We haven’t been able to get hold of her emergency contacts.” She swallowed hard. “The child’s birth certificate lists your father as his parent, making you the infant’s half-sister. From what we can ascertain, you’re also his only living relative.”